Part 2 of the March 15th Pocahontas Commission Meeting
In Part one of the Pocahontas Commission Meeting we talked about two Atlantic Coast Pipeline proposals made at the meeting, and about the public comments made. In this part, we will present the other items of business at that meeting.
The Pocahontas County Sheriff, David Jonese, asked the Commission to go into closed session to discuss a personnel matter. When they returned from the closed session, the commissioners approved the hiring of Tim Sayre as a new Deputy. The Sheriff also asked the Commissioners to allow him to move $10,000.00 of money that had been budgeted for general salaries to be used to pay overtime expenses. This money had not needed to be paid for salaries since they had a long term vacant position, but because that position was vacant for so long, they had to pay a lot more overtime to meet their minimum staffing of Deputies.
The Commissioners took action to fill the two full time positions at the new Day Report Center. Mayor Sam Felton of Marlinton, who is also a member of the Community Corrections Board addressed the Commissioners with the Board’s recommendations after interviewing the applicants for the position of Day Report Director and Day Report Officer, Sam.
“The Board of Directors of the Day Report Center put together an interview committee and we met Friday evening” said Felton. “We had 7 applications for Director and/or Officer. There was one no show. The good news was that we felt that we had at least 2 good potential prospects for each position. Without boring you with any of the details beyond that, the Interviewing Committee’s recommendation would be for the County Commission to hire Glen E. Galloway as the (Day Report) Director and James VanDevender as (Day Report) Officer. The salary for the Director would be at $35,000 annual and the Officer would be at $25,000.”
The motion was made and to hire those people for the positions effective March 28th, and approved unanimously.
The Commissioners took up the issue of reaching an agreement to have the Pocahontas County Parks and Recreation manage the Cass Community Park. This became an issue last summer when citizens living in the area of the park complained about disorderly parties occurring there and trash. Lauren Bennett, Director of the Pocahontas County Recreation and Parks addressed the Commissioners and said that they would be willing to manage the Cass Park, but they actually own the other parks they manage, while the Commission owns Cass Community Park. Since the Park was acquired on a FEMA Federal Grant, there could be complications in actually transferring the property even to a County Board like Parks and Recreation. Commission Counsel Bob Martin was asked to look into the best way of turning control of the park to Parks and Recreation.
The Commissioners approved the Poll Workers for the Primary Election on May 10th.
The Commissioners approved the 2016-2017 Fiscal Year Budget, which will be printed in the Pocahontas Times.
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