It is 1115. I'm going to call to order this work session. The Monroe County Board of Commissioners for
Thursday, October 23rd. I will note for the record that Commissioner Madera, myself, are here and present,
and at you Hill Room, and Commissioner Jones is joining us via Teams. Our first agenda item is from
the legal department. Mr. Schilling, please.
Thank you very much. We are seeking your authority to offer a little over $1,100 to settle some damages
allegedly caused by a highway truck that slid a snow plow that slid off the road and hit a fence and
damaged that fence.
And the homeowners have complained about their yard being torn up and a mailbox being destroyed as well.
The county went out and repaired the yard. The mailbox, the driver says he didn't get close to, so we
have no reason to think that the county is responsible for that. But the driver did say that it's possible
that he hit the fence.
We are seeking approval to offer that to them because that is consistent with the fence claim or fence
estimate that they received and will require them to sign a settlement agreement releasing us from all
of their claims. Okay, for that incident that day. I'm assuming this is something we have to vote on.
Yes. Yes. Okay. And where is the appropriation coming from? That is coming out of the settlement line
in the legal department budget. Great. All right. So before we get to questions for you from my colleagues,
I'm going to go ahead and make a motion to approve the fence settlement claim for 4243 West Buick Drive.
um and the the fund name is county legal fund number 1000 and the amount is 1132 dollars and 60 cents
i will second that motion all right thank you so much uh do you have any uh commissioner madura do you
have any comments or questions no this all appears very straightforward commissioner jones comments
or questions
Yeah, I'm a little curious. Originally, I was under the impression that it's just a fence post. Is it
the entire fence that's going to have to be replaced? It seems like it must be a very special fence
post for that price. Yes, it is only the fence post. And that was what the estimate was for. And we
confirmed that.
I spoke to Richard Kreider about it and he was familiar with this fence company as one that the county
uses and he felt confident, I believe, that that's what it would cost, whether that's reasonable or
not. I don't know. Yeah. It sounds amazing to me, but I guess we have to go with what we have. Yes.
All right.
Thank you so much. I don't have any other questions. Let's see if there's any public comment on this
item. You raise your hand on Teams or come to the podium. Seeing none, all those in favor of approving
this fence post settlement signify. Oh, I'm sorry, we can't do that. Mr. Cockrell, will you please call
the roll on the settlement of the fence post matter? Commissioner Thomas. Yes. Commissioner Jones. Yes.
Commissioner Madeira. Yes. Motion is approved 3 to 0. Thank you very much. Thank you. Next item, Mr. Cockrell.
Yes, I had placed something on the council agenda and I realized that I hadn't brought to you guys formally
first. We've talked about it at a couple executive sessions. We're talking about the Thompson property.
As you know, we bought it in 2001 for the purpose of expanding our jail there. We looked at that when
we were looking at jail sites and it was determined to not be appropriate for what we were planning on doing.
and we had been talking with a potential person, developer, company to buy that property in order to
put in some economic development into that property. They have kind of cooled on that but during the
conversations with the executive sessions with both the council and commissioners, it was readily apparent
that people were really
we're not really interested in utilizing that property for county purposes anytime in the near or distant
future given that it's 90 acres and relatively close to well in Bloomington and it's probably better
to get that into a private productive on the tax rolls kind of a situation. So I put that on the county
council's agenda to approve the
as an ordinance for the terms and conditions. I left the terms and conditions very broad and a lot of
aspects however we have had two appraisals on that property so it can't be sold for less than the average
of the two appraisals. I have referenced three possible Indiana codes in order to utilize for selling
that property. The first is kind of the general if we have property we put it out for bid and it gets
bid. The second is the economic development
statute where if a company somebody wants to come in and do a project with it we can utilize that and
the third is we could sell to another governmental entity. I'm intending to ask the City of Bloomington
if they have any interest in that at all just to kind of get a feel and maybe they have people who might
be interested in the property otherwise.
think there'll be a little bit of well probably quite a bit of legwork to figure out if there's a market
what the market is and how to make that market know that this potential sale is going to happen before
we actually put out the bids and that kind of stuff but it's just kind of the first step to make sure
we're all on board with with moving forward with it but I wanted to make you guys aware that I've done
that so if you don't want me to do it want me to pull from the agenda you could you could tell me now
it's still ultimately you guys would have to
determine which of those three paths to take and move forward that way. Any comments or questions,
Commissioner Jones? Makes sense to me. Commissioner Madeira? It absolutely makes sense to me as well.
Yeah. I'm on board here. So I'm glad it's on the agenda. I know we did talk about it at executive sessions.
So thank you for that. Appreciate it. I assume we don't have to vote on that. I don't think you have
to vote on that. We just got a round of consensus here. It's on the agenda. That's a direction of staff
that what I did was not inappropriate, which is really what I was looking for. Appropriate, sir. It
was appropriate. All right. Let's see. Anything else? Other updates? Nothing? OK.
Awesome. So our next regular meeting is October 30th, 10 a.m. right here in the NatU Hill Room. Thanks,
everyone. We're adjourned.