BOCC: From Cameras
to Raw Sewage

Laser Speed Camera, R&B Costs, Building Permits Down, Raw Sewage Dumping on Private Land Proposed

by George Gramlich,
News and Commentary
The August 14, 2024 Custer County Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) regular meeting was held in their bunker across from the county courthouse. at 9 a.m. All three Commissioners were present: Bill Canda, Lucas Epp and Kevin “Turncoat” Day. (“Turncoat”? Yup. Day abandoned the Republican Party and the people who elected him this year and registered as Unaffiliated. Why? Because he wants to be Commissioner for another four years. He knew he couldn’t win the Republican primary because of his totally disastrous three-year reign where he almost single-handedly destroyed our county government. Day wants four more years as the big important commissioner, attending all the important government meetings around the state, but not managing the departments he is in charge of. What say you, Happy Valley tax-paying voter?)
In Commissioner Items, Canda said the crew pushing to get three fire suppression ponds certified are dropping the Christie Coleman pond. They are still pursuing the other two.
Elected Officials’ Reports were next. Custer County Sheriff Rich Smith was first up. Smith said that the Sheriff’s Office (SO) is “fully staffed”. Smith asked the Commissioners permission to lease and install two security cameras, one at the airport and one at Road & Bridge. These would be installed and maintained by the camera company. Live footage would be available to the SO. These cameras can also read license plates which is very handy in tracking down bad guys. The cost is $5k per camera per year. The expense would be in next year’s budget. After the usual jawing the Commissioners
ok’d it.
Smith then asked for permission to purchase a handheld laser speed camera. He said it was difficult to catch speeders on Main Street in “downtown” Westcliffe due to the parking, etc. and a handheld would solve that problem. He said he also wanted to lower the ticket price for a handheld laser ticket to $40 from about $200 for a current ticket. Smith noted that the camera company can read the license plate and automatically send the ticket to the offender. Smith said there would be no license points for these tickets. Smith would like the money to go into a “safety fund” for Road & Bridge. A county ordinance is needed for this. The county Attorney will write up one for the Commissioners.
Custer County Coroner, Brad Baltzly, was next up before the Commissioners’ mighty throne. He said the county has had four deaths since the last BOCC
meeting with three being in hospice. But, there was a body discovered Saturday. Baltzly said he counts hospice deaths as regular county deaths but many counties don’t. He said that this gives the complete death picture for the county and is more accurate.
Department Reports were next.
In the Road & Bridge report, some interesting cost figures
were discussed. In the Rosita asphalt project, it cost $64k a mile to blade patch the road. The oil for chip sealing costs $16k per mile and chip rock costs $1.2k per mile. The total cost to do four miles was $69.5k. R&B asked the Commissioners for permission to stop county maintenance on County Road 111 (Blizzardine) as there was only one resident on it and it is 5.73 miles long. Maintenance in the winter is a nightmare. It was unclear if this was ok’d.
Dorothy Carsten gave the Planning & Zoning report. She said new building permits were down dramatically from last year and septic permits were also down a lot. She also said gross YTD income was down $154k from the prior year. Carsten noted she was spending a lot of her time on “compliance” issues.
She then brought up a new subject, that of allowing septic tank pumping/cleaning companies to dump the toxic human waste sludge they pump out of septic tanks on Custer County private land. She said currently the septic pumpers have to drive down the hill to dump the waste and that is costly. She also said it would be a “great way to keep water in our county”. (Which is insane. The amount of septic pumped water dumped by these companies is trivial compared to our overall water resources. Using the old “save our water” argument here is pathetic. Also, the negative environmental impact of dumping thousands of gallons of RAW HUMAN WASTE AND OTHER BAD THINGS SEWAGE on our land are huge. Do you want YOUR neighbor to do this, folks? Do we occasionally have a little WIND around here, fellow landowners? Plus, I believe Carsten’s husband owns a septic pumping company here and that conflict of interest was not disclosed in her talk. That doesn’t look good.) Carsten told the Commissioners that the fed EPA has regulations for doing this and somehow that makes it ok. She noted that P&Z has had two Special Use Permit (SUP’s) applications to do this in Happy Valley but the applicants withdrew both due to their neighbors being “upset” about it. (“Upset” is not the correct term.) Carsten wants the Commissioners to amend the county’s zoning regulation to allow this. Canda asked her, “How much water are we
actually saving” and there was no real answer. (Comment: This is the LAST thing we need here in Happy Valley. Dumping contaminated raw sewage on our pristine land. It is mind boggling that she is asking for this. For what? To save a few bucks for the septic pumpers. One of which is her husband.)
The Commissioners seemed to not make any decision on this outrageous proposal.

Clyde Butler, Airport Manager, gave the SilverWest Airport
report. He said the Airfest was a big success with around 750 people showing up.
The Landfill Report was brief: They took in $141k so far and all equipment is running good. The new compactor will be here, hopefully, in the middle of
October.
Human Services reported that they will be having Goodwill Industries process LEAP applications going forward. HR will do the interviews and then send the date to Goodwill for processing.
The Finance Department report was next up. Lisa Hemann from Redlands Accounting gave the report. Redlands is the private
accounting firm that the county hired to help with the innumerable accounting, processing, credit card and audit issues we have due to the prior Finance Director, Braden Wilson, disastrous two-year reign. Lisa said she and her firm have been working diligently on a variety of issues including account reconciliation and monitoring various accounting functions. She said they had been working with the Treasurer’s Department on cash reconciliation and she is having some problems with our new accounting system (CIC) as it is a “little clunky”. (Meaning there are “issues” with it.) Her firm is also examining the income statement and is spending a lot of time on accounting entries that are being “misclassified”. She noted that due to a “clerical error” the county has been overpaying on insurance but that is fixed now.
She said the county’s credit card data is still not up to speed as some departments are not entering the date or doing it wrong. The county’s credit card outstanding balance at the end of July was $53.6k with $34.5k being overdue. Lisa said she has proposed a credit card processing policy for the county and Epp said he is working on it.
Canda asked Lisa if the credit card issues could be a “qualifying” item on our current audit and she said probably not. Epp said our auditor is looking into that. At the end of the report, Epp said that our auditor told Epp that “we will not have a qualified
audit” but it will “still look bad” as we still have a lot of cleaning up work to do. (Note: A continued payback from the disastrous
decision by Kevin Day to hire Braden Wilson, a person with NO accounting experience, to be our Finance Director of our NINE MILLION DOLLAR a year operation three years ago. That decision has cost the county hundreds of thousands of dollars and we are not even close to cleaning up the mess.)
Vernon Roth, our Information & Technology Director, gave the IT report. Vernon noted that there are (of course) new state regulations “coming down” on secure communications and we need new policies for that. He also said that the Commissioners have again given IT the Public Information Officer (PIO) job as the Commissioner’s Admin Assist quit. Vernon said he also bundled together all the Xerox maintenance contracts for the county to make the process simpler.
Vernon has been working on the 2025 budget and will deliver the proposed budgets to the departments that day. (Remember after Finance Director Wilson got the heave ho, and the accounting department was in total disarray, Vernon volunteered to help out and SINGLE HANDILY saved the day by putting in hundreds of hours of work in fixing things and keeping things going. At this point, Vernon knows our CIC accounting system better than anybody. Without this guy, folks, we would have crashed completely. When you see Vernon on the street, give him a hearty thanks. Vernon is the epitome of public service.) Vernon said he will be having meetings with the department heads over the next week and a half to go over the budget process. He also has nine new policies for the Commissioners to review.
Our superhero Veteran Service Officer, Dominic Edginton then gave his report. Dominic said that he had 52 scheduled appointments last month and 43 walk-ins. Plus 15 new VA claims filed. He has filed 263 new claims since he arrived last year and got $1.55 MILLION dollars in compensation for our veterans. He noted that 12% of Custer County citizens are veterans and we are basically tied with El Paso County at having the highest rate in the state. (I can’t state often enough how Dominic has completely changed the lives of our Veterans here. The guy is a human dynamo and knows the VA system as well as anybody in the whole country. We are so blessed to have him.)
Office of Emergency Management was the next reporting
department. Robin Knappe, Director, gave the report. As usual it was all about trying to get grants from the feds and the state to do “projects” here in Happy Valley. Grants, grants, grants, grants. Projects, projects, projects, projects. (For what? All these “projects” seem like make-work efforts. A little mitigation here, a little there. Trying to get some computers as back up if we get hacked.
Where is the cost/benefit analysis on these projects to see if it is worth spending our tax money on? Where is the Return on Investment analysis? The country is totally bankrupt, and we are wasting thousands of dollars here on truly totally trivial and non-essential stuff. The Commissioners should try to reign in this wasteful spending and set an example about being fiscally conservative. The only real danger we have here is fire and we have one of the best Fire Districts in the country and also an outstanding Sheriff’s Office (and Road & Bridge). If a fire goes big, the feds are right here. There is no need for a full-time OEM Director. Part-time would do it, just fill out all the state and fed reports that need to be filed. Let’s get real, folks. Hard times are coming, and we need to get our house in order. We can start here.)
New Business was the next Agenda item.
The first item was approving July Accounts Payable. This passed.
Chair Day then read the next Agenda Item, Hiring a Public Health Director. (Hmmmm, something wrong here….) Day says we did the interviews the other day and should we hire now? County
Attorney Slater then suddenly pipes up and says the obvious (to everybody but Day): Is this a Board of Health decision or a BOCC decision? (You see, the Public Health Director works in the Board of Public Health which is a COMPLETELY different legal entity than the BOCC. They have their own board meetings and hire their own people. The BOCC has NOTHING to do with their operation. Somehow the BOCC MENSA team forgot about that.) Confusion reigns. After some babbling, the Commissioners decide to have a Board of Health Board meeting the next day to handle this.
Lastly, Epp says the BOCC is having a special staff meeting, September 21st at 2 p.m. To discuss staffing for Finance, BOCC Admin Assist and the PIO slot.
And that was it. Another perfect day in Happy Valley.