by George Gramlich,
News and Commentary
The May 5, 2025 Custer County Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) meeting was held at the airport and started at 9:03 a.m. All three Commissioners were present: Chair Bill Canda (via Zoom) and Lucas Epp and Paul Vogelsong.
In Commissioner Items, Canda stated the new aviation fuel tank’s concrete approach apron was poured. Canda then noted that he had talked to Round Mountain Water about whether they can accept donations that are tax deductible and revealed that they could. (In a previous BOCC, Canda had stated that they could not.) Round Mountain is setting up accounts in our two local banks for donations to help with the construction of the new waste treatment facility. He also said that the Town of Westcliffe has approved a $10k donation for the project.
In New Business, the first item was a presentation by the Custer County Backpack project. Deborah Bell gave the talk. She said the effort was started in 2016 and last year they delivered 162 backpacks to our school kids (which was 54% of the school population). After filling each backpack for the specific grade, the cost per pack runs from around $40 to $100. They are looking for donations. Epp made a motion for the county to donate $500. After a bit, this was passed.
Next Item was the Beckwith Ranch’s application for a beer permit for their June 12 Annual Round Up event. This was approved.
Epp was next with a proposal to change the quarterly budget review meetings to workshops (instead of a special BOCC meeting). This would give the Commissioners the option of having no public comment. (This was probably the reason. The public has the regular meetings to comment.) This was approved.
The next Item was a proposal to send out a Request for Proposal to various companies that provide in-house Information Technology (IT) support. Epp led this. Basically, instead of hiring one or more full-time County IT employees, the Commissioners want to know if these companies can do it cheaper (and maybe better). This discussion went on for a bit. They are looking at a contract for a price of around $150k. They voted to proceed with this effort.
Lastly, the County’s insurance company, CTSI, had their loss expert there to give the annual review of the County’s loss experience. The analyst had delivered the report to the Commissioners prior to the meeting. The big item was the large loss amount increase last year, the majority of which was from an excessive force on a minor incident a few years ago. (This was under the prior Sheriff’s term.) The case was finally settled last year with a settlement of around $800k. The analyst stated that the County’s “employment conditions” lawsuits were set-tled for around $300k. In our Workmen’s Compensation arena, most of the claims were from the Sheriff’s Office due to their physical training (including use of force training) courses and the regular course of business in arrests, etc. The analysts stated that there was a “rather high” number of claims from the SO the last two years.
This of course sent the Commissioners, especially Epp, into waves of lamentations about how they must manage the claims better and that the County must do a better job of training, etc.
On and on. In the end, no real plan was proposed.
At the end of the meeting, Epp announced that the BOCC meetings would be held on Wednesdays going forward starting May 28th.