Commissioners discuss solar invoice, building projects, sewer upgrades

Highland County commissioners Terry Britton, David Daniels and Brad Roades gave an update on a months-long disagreement over a Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) invoice and discussed several local projects totaling over $7 million during their Wednesday, Sept. 27 meeting.

As previously reported, commissioners voted to issue the first PILOT invoice for the New Market Solar project March 22. Commissioners voted 3-0 to approve sending the letter and invoice to Liberty I Renewables - Hecate Energy for the first “service payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT), including the additional annual service payment,” the letter said.

The first half-year payment of $450,000 — or $9,000 per kilowatt — was due April 20, according to the invoice.

In June, Daniels said they still haven’t “heard anything back” from the developers, but they were working with the Ohio Power Siting Board and the Ohio Department of Development to seek further information. Due to delays with getting the solar panels, the project is only “30-percent complete,” he said, “and until they actually end up being complete, then they are responsible to pay the public utilities tax on those parcels.”

Commissioners said Wednesday they recently received “some correspondence back from Hecate Energy” in response to an invoice issued by the county in the spring.

“We're going to have to look into all the details on that and actually talk to the state of Ohio and find out exactly what's going on here,” Britton said. “More to come.”

Daniels added that he still believes that Hecate should be paying the invoice.

“In my opinion, once you start putting energy into the grid, you’re operational,” Daniels said. “Our PILOT normally says that you have to pay whatever the faceplate generation capacity is, whether it gets produced or not. They've already started putting amps into the grid. They should be paying.

“I know that there's some communication between the Department of Development, the Department of Taxation and the Power Siting Board as to what constitutes ‘certificate of completion.’ I think we need to make our opinion known to those people that, hey, they're producing electricity and putting it in the grid. They owe.”

Also during Wednesday’s meeting, Highland County’s American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding coordinator Nicole Oberrecht gave updates on several ongoing multimillion-dollar projects, as well as on a recently awarded grant to the county for sewer upgrades.

As previously reported, commissioners voted 3-0 to award the new Ohio State University Extension building project in the amount of $1,113,599 in July. That project, which is underway at the Highland County Fairgrounds, is “moving along nicely,” according to Oberrecht, as the county recently had a meeting with contractors.

“They poured the footers for the foundation walls,” she said. “This coming week, we'll get the plumbers in there to sort of do their thing. We’ve had a good stretch of weather, and they've been able to get a little ahead of schedule.”

For the other county building project — the records center on Beech Street — Oberrecht said they are working with McCarty Associates, LLC, who is providing engineering and architecture design services, to finalize everything after awarding the project last month.

After more than a year of planning and discussions, commissioners voted Aug. 30 to award the new county records storage building project to Alpha Construction Inc., who had submitted a $2,797,000 proposal.

“The record center, we’re just trying to finalize the contract documents,” Oberrecht said. “Right now they're in McCarty's hands and trying to get that wrapped up and hopefully get that executed here pretty soon.”

A meeting with contractors is planned for a different county project, as commissioners voted in April to award the Rocky Fork Lake Wastewater Treatment Plant Improvements Project (Phase 1) bid to Doll Layman, Ltd., in the amount of $2,597,700.

“Next week, we're supposed to have our first progress meeting for the Rocky Fork Lake wastewater upgrade project,” Oberrecht said. “They haven't even broke ground out there. They're really in the submittal phase of Doll Layman working with EES [Environmental Engineering Services] and getting those all ironed out.”

Finally, Oberrecht gave an update on a different sewer project, as the Ohio Governor’s Office announced Sept. 15 that “Highland County will receive a $416,000 Critical Infrastructure grant to assist the neighborhood of Rolling Acres, located in New Market Township, with sewer facility improvements.”

“We had originally talked about setting ARPA money aside for the Rolling Acres upgrades,” Oberrecht said. “That's replacing the sewer lines and manholes at the Rolling Acres subdivision out there on Mad River. Since then, we applied for funding through the Community Development Block Grant Critical Infrastructure, and so we got word last week that that was funded.

“We were pretty excited to get that. I think there were 32 applicants throughout the state that turned in applications for that, and we were one of 17 that got funded.”

Along with the $416,000 CI grant, Oberrecht said the county has “a little over $100,000 that we're using out of our local revolving loan fund” being put toward the project.

“I don't believe we'll have to use ARPA funding for that project anymore,” she said. “I think with the grant, and then using our local revolving loan fund as match, we'll be able to cover the entire project costs.”

According to the State of Ohio, “The project will replace the existing, failing six-inch sewer line with a new eight-inch line, as well as install 10 new manholes. The project will benefit 75 people.”

“The first step for that will be we've got to perform an environmental review out there,” Oberrecht said. “Once that's finished, we'll be able to get it out to bid.”

Britton said it was a “great reward” and thanked Oberrecht for “all the work” she put in to applying for that grant. “You did good work on this,” Daniels added.

“We had to do a little bit of legwork with that one,” Oberrecht said. “It's not qualified by census as LMI [Low- and Moderate-Income], so Mary [Remsing, commission clerk] and I went out and had to do door-to-door canvassing of income surveys. Getting awarded the project made it all worthwhile.”

In other discussion:

• Commissioners voted 3-0 to approve an agreement with Highland County Job and Family Services, Washington County Board of Commissioners and Washington County Job and Family Services for Washington County to assist in processing Highland County Medicaid cases.

“This is related to the public health emergency rollback unwinding that everybody's been talking about for a year and a half, really, and we're kind of in the middle of it right now,” Highland County JFS Director Jeremy Ratcliff said. “We've had some staffing issues that haven't allowed us to process our Medicaid cases as timely as Department of Medicaid would like.”

During a meeting with commissioners in June, Ratcliff said that “staffing is a huge issue for us on that side of the agency” and that “the amount of work that's coming as a result of the Medicaid unwinding is extensive.” On Wednesday, he said that Highland County JFS met the state’s “benchmark of 90 percent” last month, “but a couple months prior to that we weren't able to hit 90 percent,” so the state reached out to offer assistance from Washington County JFS.
 
“Washington County has the capacity to process extra cases, and so they reached out to the Ohio Department of Medicaid, and the Job and Family Services Directors’ Association got ahold of me and said, ‘Hey, we see here that you guys could use a little help and getting these processed,’” Ratcliff said. “The benefit of the way the JFS system is structured technologically on the public assistance side — whether it's SNAP or Medicaid cases — is they can be processed anywhere, so it doesn't have to be processed at 1575 North High Street [the Highland County JFS office].

“They can be processed for our citizens in Washington County. This is just a contract that allows us to kind of share some of that workload with them, and we’ll pay them per case that they’re able to process for us, to help the state, essentially, achieve the benchmark that’s being set in Columbus.”

Daniels said the contract has “an amount of $45,000, which equates out to about a thousand cases that” Washington County would process. “Do we have a thousand cases that need to be addressed still?” he asked.

“Oh, absolutely,” Ratcliff said. “We're approaching 16,000 citizens in Highland County — so maybe 35 percent of the county is on Medicaid coverage.

“During the pandemic, no JFS was allowed to take negative action. We could not remove somebody from Medicaid coverage. Now that that's been rolled back, now we need to redetermine who is eligible, who stays on and who's not eligible and who comes off.”

After hearing from Ratcliff, commissioners voted 3-0 to approve the proposal.

• Via resolution, commissioners voted 3-0 to authorize the Highland County Sheriff's Office to apply for the Ohio Body-Worn Camera Grant Program application, and if awarded facilitate receipt of funding; payment to Fortress Technologies for IT, training and supportive services; and to Motorola Solutions for equipment, supplies, training and service costs in the amount of $111,045.75.

The Ohio Governor Office announced earlier this month that $5 million in grant funding is available to help local law enforcement agencies invest in body camera equipment and pay for associated expenses through the third round of the Ohio Body-Worn Camera Grant Program. The deadline to apply is Oct. 2.

The department had previously purchased body cameras several years ago; however, due to records retention and storage issues, they are not being used, according to Chief Deputy Brandon Stratton.

“This is a whole new program,” Stratton said. “This is a five-year program where they maintain it, but also store all the digital evidence for us. In our last program, that was our issue was the storage. We didn't have a means to store the data for up to a year.”

• Commissioners voted 3-0 to approve the 2023-2024 planned maintenance agreement for HVAC services with Weller’s Plumbing and Heating.

According to Britton, “the only increase on that is through the controls company that we use [Amaresco], and that will be a three-percent increase.” Altogether, the agreement is for a total cost of $41,410, he said.

“A three-percent increase in this environment is not all that hateful,” Daniels said.

On a similar topic, Britton announced that the county is seeking funding through the Ohio Department of Development’s Community Energy Efficiency Program to replace an outdated control system at the Highland County Justice Center.

The control system “runs HVAC, hot water heaters, everything pretty much out there,” Britton said, and it is the original system from when the building opened in 2001. The county is also working with Weller’s and Amaresco to plan a solution for ongoing issues.

“We've been having a lot of issues with it,” Britton said. “We’ve had to get our IT people to rebuild it, just to get it back up. They've told us that if it goes down again, it’s probably not going to work.

“There is a grant through the state that we can get for $250,000. The replacement cost on that is a little over $300,000.”

Daniels added that the current repairs are “a bad Band-Aid at best.”

• Also approved was a partial payment to Reed Mechanical Construction, LLC for work on Sycamore Circle in Greenfield, a previously announced Community Development Block Grant project.

The village was granted CDBG funding for Critical Infrastructure to address ongoing drainage problems. The county awarded the project to Reed Mechanical in the amount of $156,941.

“Mary [Remsing, CDBG coordinator] said that she'd been there, and it’s moving along quite well,” Roades said.

• Commissioners met with representatives of the Alternatives to Violence Center and recognized the upcoming Domestic Violence Awareness Month with a proclamation. For more, see the story at: https://highlandcountypress.com/domestic-violence-awareness-month-obser….

• Commissioners were scheduled to have a work session with records manager Julie Wallingford Wednesday.

Commissioners also approved the following resolutions, each by a 3-0 vote:

• A transfer of funds from Public Assistance Account, 2050 to Child Support Enforcement Fund 2015 in the amount of $24,425.65 for Child Support Enforcement coverage of ceiling excess.

• A transfer of funds from Public Assistance Account, 2050 to Children Services fund, 2115 in the amount of $28,915.92.

• A transfer of funds from Public Assistance Account, 2050 to Children Services fund, 2115 in the amount of $3,418.80 for foster care costs.

• A budget modification within the Auditor’s 1000 budget in the amount of $8,700.

• A budget modification within the Auditor’s 1000 budget in the amount of $800.

• A budget modification within the Economic Development 1000 budget in the amount of $1,000.