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STEUBENVILLE -- Jefferson County commissioners and the county board of elections staff talked Thursday about a mandate that says each of Ohio's 88 counties must purchase new voting machines for the 2020 election.
Diane Gribble, board of elections director, said the current touch-screen machines are 12 years old. The state is proposing funding 80 percent of the cost, but it could be 50-50 by the time the funding becomes available, she said.
State law has a requirement of having one machine for each 175 registered voters, she said, noting she would prefer keeping similar touch-screen machines because voters are familiar with its operation.
One company has presented machine options to the board of elections. The machines have to be certified by the state.
Gribble said she likes a hybrid of the touch screen and optical scanner, which allows a voter to press on the screen to vote, and, when finished, a paper ballot will be ejected for the voter to approve his or her choices. The paper ballot then is inserted, and the machine tabulates the vote. Gribble said the machine keeps a running tally of the results, and at the end of the voting, precinct workers will insert a jump drive into each machine for the results and take the jump drive to the board of elections.
Currently, each machine has a memory card, and each card is taken to the board of elections. The jump drive will reduce the time for the final results to be released to the public, Gribble said.
An optical scanner with paper ballots is initially cheaper to purchase, but Gribble said the board of elections has to spend about $25,000 each election to have the paper ballots printed. Unused paper ballots are destroyed, she said.
The hybrid machine Gribble said she likes will cost about $2.1 million, with the optical scanners costing around $1 million.
County Commissioner Thomas Graham said he likes the idea of buying machines that the voters are familiar with using.
In other matters, City Manager James Mavromatis gave the commissioners an update on money saved by making former police Prosecutor Steve Lamatrice an assistant county prosecutor.
Lamatrice was named an assistant county prosecutor in May 2016. Mavromatis said Lamatrice now has the ability to take felony cases from municipal court directly to common pleas court as a bill of information, bypassing the grand jury process.
Lamatrice in 13 months has processed 60 bills of information.
Mavromatis said some defendants in city felony cases sit in jail for up to a year. It costs $55 a day to house a prisoner in the county jail, or $20,075 a year. The bills of information reduce the time in the county jail down to less than one month.
County Commissioner David Maple said the cost of housing, prosecuting and paying for a court-appointed defense attorney touches many parts of the county budget.
"The evidence is clear this was a pretty good move," he said.
Commissioners at the request of the county engineer's office rejected the two bids received last week for the replacement of the bridge on county Road 75A near John Gregg Elementary School because the contractors didn't complete state-required paperwork. The state is paying for 80 percent of the estimated $735,854 cost of the bridge replacement.
Kara Bernhart, county bridge engineer, said the concrete bridge, built in the 1930s, was reduced to a 10-ton limit and then to 5 tons. She said she closed the bridge about three years ago because of concerns that school buses were crossing the bridge. The closing of the bridge left only one way out of John Gregg Elementary School. Buses have to cross another bridge and railroad tracks, and teachers and parents are concerned about possible delays with trains on the tracks.
Bernhart said she applied in 2012 for federal highway funding for the bridge replacement, but it takes about six years to go through the funding process. She was able to get the funding moved up one year, it was noted.
County Engineer James Branagan added the project having to be rebid will delay completion until November.
Commissioners approved a $70,870 change order for paving at the county airport. The Federal Aviation Administration is paying to pave a narrow taxiway planes use to enter the runway but not the areas from the hangers to the taxiway. Geary Bates of the regional airport authority said the money is available in the airport's budget for the additional paving work.
Commissioners proclaimed June 15 as Elder Abuse Awareness Day.