During a record 15-minute meeting, Allen County commissioners discussed SPARK funding from the federal government on Tuesday and badly needed road repairs.
Allen County has spent about half of its $2.4 million in SPARK funding from the federal government provided via the CARES Act, said Lisse Regehr, CEO of Thrive Allen County.
She suspected that by the next reporting period, however, much more of the money would report being distributed.
The exigency is that the county only has until the end of the year to exhaust the funds, or otherwise send them back.
Regehr also noted that some of the SPARK money had been returned by entities within the county, when they discovered they could not purchase the items they believed they would.
The Southeast Kansas Multi-County Health Department, for example, determined that it could not make a hire that it had desired.
As to how the funds will be spent, some possibilities include buying more touchless technologies for public buildings such as the courthouse, increased courtroom security and improvements to the senior center.
PUBLIC works director Mitch Garner said that problems continue in the area of Nebraska Road, where soil is being hauled out by heavy trucks.
Too many trucks passing through had prevented repairs, he said, and so other solutions were attempted, including road closures.
Garner and commissioners again posed the question as to whether the soil remediation company hauling dirt to the new elementary school site should have to compensate the county for any damages caused.
Commissioner Bruce Symes inquired about designating a truck route, but Garner said that then trucks would end up damaging other nearby roads such as 2000th Street.
The plan is to eventually return the roads in question to gravel, or as commissioner Bill King put it, “break an egg to make an omelette.”
Heavy trucks will be passing through the area for the next 2.5 years, so all agreed that more permanent solutions would need to be found.
Heavy trucks had also been hauling gravel to windmills in the area, but not using the right roads to do so, said commissioner Jerry Daniels, but noted that the problem had been “corrected.”
NEXT week, due to the opening of advanced voting, which begins today, commissioners will meet in their regular room upstairs.
