Commissioners exclude WCIEDD from EDIT plan

Ryan Keller

In divvying up the estimated $1.076 million in Economic Development Income Tax (EDIT) funding Putnam County will receive in 2020, the county commissioners will not allocate any of it to the West Central Indiana Economic Development District.

After each commissioner had expressed his opinion Tuesday morning on what each line item in the plan should receive, President Rick Woodall shared his thoughts on the conclusion he and Commissioner David Berry had both reached.

He spoke of how new WCIEDD Executive Director Ryan Keller had done a lot of work in recent months to rebuild the relationship Putnam county.

“Ryan has done a tremendous job of getting things on the right path,” Woodall said. “But I don’t think we’re there yet.”

Besides, local officials have generally been partial to the economic development services provided by the Greencastle-Putnam County Development Center.

Represented during Tuesday’s meeting by Director Kristin Clary, the development center was again funded for $50,000, matching the amount from the City of Greencastle.

For his part, Commissioner Don Walton, the commissioners’ liaison to West Central, supported funding the Terre Haute-based agency at its originally requested amount of $16,191.

Even Keller had backed off of this request on Tuesday. Instead, the director made a more modest proposal.

“You and I have been working over the last few months to try and rebuild that relationship,” Keller said. “As we’ve been working back and forth for the last few months, I have realized there are still some trust issues.”

Keller proposed that the county not fund the economic development portion of its services, but still support the Area VII Agency on Aging, as well as the Small Urban and Rural Transportation Planning Program, which does traffic counts.

Keller’s amended request was for $8,663.

Even these requests were contended, with County Highway Supervisor Mike Ricketts saying the county does its own traffic counts and Clary asking for proof of how the senior citizen funding is spent in the county.

Though Keller could point to a number of senior programs West Central administers, his examples were light on specifics to Putnam County.

While the commissioners were far from the most vocal critics in the room, Woodall and Berry also seemed unmoved by the arguments, ultimately putting a zero on the line item over Walton’s objections.

However, a number of other programs will be funded with the projected $1,075,641 in the EDIT fund in 2020, including a pair of brand new line items.

The first of these will be $150,000 to the newly-formed Putnam County EMS. With the county still transitioning from the non-profit Putnam County Operation Life to the county-owned service, the $150,000 is being looked at as start-up costs in addition to the $400,000 annual budget.

For example, an examination of the one backup ambulance the service owns revealed that the vehicle would be unsafe for more than extremely short-term fill-in for one of the three front-line ambulances.

However, the county is looking into the purchase of a used ambulance that is 10 years old but only has 50,000 miles for around $20,000.

Additionally, the county also recently received a letter that the defibrillators in each ambulance will no longer be serviced by the company that sold them, meaning that at some point the county will have to buy four new units at a cost of $20,000-$30,000 each.

The new line item should help the EMS service as it continues its transition.

The other new line item concerns the Putnam County Highway Department in its need for new dump trucks.

The department is in need of six new trucks, which will likely come at a cost of $1.2 million, about four times the $303,000 the highway has in the budget for equipment this year.

As such, the commissioners voted to create a highway equipment fund of $200,000 from the EDIT plan to allow for a larger payment on the trucks, thus reducing the amount of finance the county will need to seek.

The only other deviation from requested amounts in the EDIT plan was for People Pathways. Having received $11,000 in 2019, the non-profit group requested $20,000 in 2020.

In the end, the commissioners settled on $15,000.

The final approved amounts for each EDIT line item were as follows:

Though the commissioners’ suggested amounts differed on some line items, Walton’s thoughts on West Central were the only serious disagreement.

In the end, Walton even put this aside and approval of the EDIT plan was unanimous.