Pocahontas Commission Considers Budget Options For Community Corrections

Marlinton, WV – Travis Carter, Executive Director of North Central Community Corrections, presented some budget options to the Pocahontas County Commission during their meeting Tuesday. North Central oversees the Community Corrections program in Pocahontas. He credits success of the program to county director Elissa Taylor and the county Sheriffs dept.

Carter will soon submit a grant request to Charleston to fund North Centrals’ multi county program. With this in mind, he presented a couple of budget options to the Commission. Option one covers the program as it is now for 117,000.00. The county would provide over 50,000.00 in matching funds. Option two has the county paying for Taylors salary and benefits. This means the cost of the program would be 82,000.00 and the county’s match would be just over 35,000.00. Carter also spoke about hiring an assistant to help Taylor. The Commission asked Carter to come back during the one of the schedule budget work session to discuss this further.

In other business, Pocahontas County Sheriff David Jonese says the counties application for the Recovery House grant is moving forward. He says he’s received verbal confirmation from Charleston that the Pocahontas County grant has been approved, one of only 9 submitted to receive approval. They also agreed to fund the grant in full, in excess of $320,000.00.

Jonese says they must have a location selected by June, any refurbishment complete by the end of the year, and open the facility by March of 2011. He says the grant will cover everything except daily operations. The facility is intended to recover some of the costs the county currently spends in keeping drug and alcohol offenders incarcerated. He hopes to open it up to neighboring counties, as a regional treatment facility, a proposal that could offset some of the operations cost. Jonese also thanks the Pocahontas County Prevention Coalition and the Family Resource Network for putting the grant application together.

The Commission also heard from, Jim Cooper, recently retired from the US Dept of Agriculture and now working to promote a regional approach to growing and marketing locally produced food in Pocahontas, Greenbrier and Monroe Counties. Cooper says they’ll host a potluck supper on March 15th at 6pm at Marlinton Middle School. Anyone interested in local foods is encouraged to come.

The Commission also took the following actions:

Appointed Tracy Samples to the Dramas, Fairs and Festivals board
Appointed Ruby Burns to fill the unexpired term of Commissioner Martin Saffer on the County Board of Health
Made contributions of 1000.00 to Mountain Resource Conservation & Development and 2000.00 to the Northern Pocahontas Food Pantry
Agreed to write a letter of support for the county schools 21st Century Learning Center grant application.