After five rounds of voting, still no County Council president

County council meetings in Indiana tend to be a little dry.

As important as the job of controllng the county's purse strings may be, the month-to-month minutiae facing the seven-member board, including additional appropriations, transfers and line items, can a bit overwhelming to all but county government insiders.

So it came to be on Tuesday that the most compelling part of the first Putnam County Council meeting of 2019 not only involved no money, but ultimately ended without a decision.

The question at hand was who will serve as the president of the board. Often a routine matter on other public boards, with various members passing around the gavel from year to year, the Putnam County Council is going through a leadership change for just the second time in nearly a quarter century.

Darrel Thomas, recently retired from his District 3 position after four terms, served nine years as president. Before that, Mitch Proctor served for 15.

Keith Berry, who was vice president for the entire nine years Thomas was president, opened the meeting by announcing he is not interested in the position.

"I've run enough meetings," Berry said, relating that he's chaired meetings at the county, state and even national level.

"In 2004, I was at a meeting in Texas that the president of the United States attended, and I ran that meeting," Berry said.

Berry then went to each of his five colleagues at the meeting (more on Gene Beck's absence later) and asked if they would be willing to serve as president in 2019.

Dave Fuhrman, Larry Parker and Phil Gick all said yes. Jill Bridgewater said, "Not at this time," while Danny Wallace, in his first meeting in Thomas' old seat, said he was not interested.

And so it went to a vote, with Berry distributing a slip of paper to each member before he collected them and counted them, along with Auditor Lorie Hallett and council attorney Trudy Selvia.

"The new president is," Berry said, pausing for effect, "we have a tie."

In fact, it was a 2-2-2 tie.

"It was so much easier when we could just dump it on Darrel," Fuhrman quipped.

The second vote got them somewhere, with Fuhrman receiving the fewest votes and dropping from contention.

However, the two-man race between Parker and Gick got nowhere fast.

Council members voted.

Berry, Hallett and and Selvia left the room to count.

Berry re-entered with a 3-3 tally and no new president.

Three times they voted with the same result.

To the credit of the two men seeking the office, there seemed to be no tension between Parker and Gick, though they sit right next to each other in the current configuration of the table.

Instead, everyone handled the indecision with good humor, even as they were getting a civics lesson in real time.

Although the intent was to "vote until we get someone," it became apparent this could have gone on all night.

The idea was briefly floated of calling Beck, as a tie would be impossible with seven votes. However, Selvia strongly questioned the legality of such a move and advised the council against taking such action.

In the end, Beck was not called, whether out of respect for the law or the privacy of his vote.

Instead, Gick made a motion to table the matter of the presidency until February, which passed unanimously.

Alas, Berry had to run at least one more meeting before a decision was made.

Fortunately for the acting president, the rest of the evening was fairly routine.

The biggest financial news of the night wasn't actually on the agenda, with County Clerk Heather Gilbert and Commissioner Rick Woodall announcing that internet service bills from HOP Telecom for every county office increased by approximately 50 percent in the most recent billing cycle. The higher bills arrived on Dec. 28 and were due on Dec. 31.

Besides the short turnaround, the increase came several months after the 2019 budget was approved, meaning there will be budget shortfalls across the board in the area of internet service.

John Hendrich of HOP Telecom explained to Gilbert that an upgrade to higher-speed service was required to meet the demands of the county's switch to Odyssey court system software.

Unfortunately, both Gilbert and Adult Probation Director Teresa Parrish said even the upgrade has not helped their ability to quickly access cases through Odyssey, a changeover that some county offices were against from the beginning.

"It's caused us a lot of problems and it's still causing us problems," Parrish said.

With the slow service from Odyssey continuing, Hendrich has told county officials the problem is with Odyssey, not with the internet service.

"This is case No. 67 of why we need an IT guy," Woodall said.

In other business:

* Parrish requested a five-percent pay increase for one of her employees.

The request was made because it was not approved in the across-the-board increases granted to all county employees late last year. The reason for the hold-up is that this person is paid from state money, not local.

The council gave tentative approval, pending advertising the measure prior to the February meeting.

The council also approved compensation adjustments in the Assessor's Office.

New County Assessor Janet Brown said the pay adjustments spring from the changing of duties for various employees since she ascended from deputy to assessor at the beginning of January.

* The council approved paying $5,000 from the EDIT Warchest to Pyramid Architecture/Engineering for the feasibility study that was done on the Greencastle Masonic Lodge last year to see if it would make a suitable courthouse annex.

In the end, county officials decided not to locate the annex in the building.

* Another $4,000 from Warchest will go toward the December demolition of an unsafe building in Brick Chapel. Woodall told the council the commissioners hope to get a fund established for such matters, but this was the first building demolished under the unsafe buildings ordinance.

"Being the first one, we don't really have a fund established or anything," Woodall said.

* The expenditure of $30,000 on the rewritten county employee handbook was approved.

While the original estimate for a new handbook came in at half that amount, officials subsequently decided to add writing new job descriptions to the scope of work.

The amount approved will also cover having the new books printed.