by George Gramlich,
News and Commentary

The April 17, 2024 Custer County Board of County Commissioners regular meeting started at 9 a.m. in their lavishly appointed meeting room in the building across from the courthouse. Commissioners Kevin Day and Bill Canda were present. Commissioner Lucas Epp was absent with no explanation given.
The first major item of business was the Upper Arkansas Council of Governments (UACOG) presentation about building “affordable housing” on the seven lots in Silver Cliff that the BOCC wants to give them (for nothing). The deal is that UACOG coughs up money for most of it but the new owners help with the construction. Bottom line is that the new owners get a new house under market cost.
(It wasn’t revealed how UACOG picks the lucky people.)
After the presentation, Canda asked an obvious question that wasn’t addressed: Is there anything preventing the new owners from selling the property (“flipping”) once they owned it (and make a ton of money)? The UACOG guy said no. Canda said he wanted restrictions placed on the deed to prevent this. Day did not want to proceed further with the process of giving UACOG the lots or the deed restriction issue without Epp being there, so he tabled it for a future date.
Next up was buying a vehicle for Planning & Zoning and the Assessor’s Office for field visits. (Both offices have vehicles, but they are basically non-functioning.) The Commissioners allocated up to $50k for a vehicle suggesting something like a Toyota 4 Runner.
Bob Smith from Human Resources then presented the issues with employee health insurance deductions from employee paychecks being incorrect for a couple of months. There was a screwup with the county’s accounting system (CTSI) with a bunch of employees not having enough deducted. The total for all employees was $14k. After a lot of discussion, and some employee input, the Commissioners decided to pay the $14k for the employees. In Public Commenting on this issue, local democrat big wig James “Dr. Doom” Gilbert bizarrely claimed that the screwup happened because of all the complaints from the citizens about the Finance Department not fixing the audit issues! The complaints “distracted” the Finance Department from simply entering the data correctly. (Doomy lives on another planet, folks. God Bless him.)
And those were the major issues.