Coffee with Commissioners event draws a crowd

Sep. 8—JEFFERSON — The Ashtabula County Board of Commissioners hosted an event on Wednesday morning to speak with residents about a number of issues.

Earlier this year, they started hosting "Coffee with the Commissioners" events around the county. Wednesday's event, taking place at Wall Street Coffee Company in Jefferson, was attended by a large number of people.

Commissioner J.P. Ducro gave an update on his efforts to expand broadband availability in the county.

He told attendees about the Affordable Connectivity Program.

"It's a government program that provides a $30 discount off your internet service," Ducro said. "So if you qualify, and I think that's 200 percent of the poverty level, which is about a $54,000 household income for a family of four, that's something that anybody's entitled to if they qualify for that program."

The county is working on a contract with a company to install equipment on three towers in New Lyme, Cherry Valley and Richmond townships to provide wireless internet service to residents.

"Hopefully by the end of the year, we'll have service available to about 6,000 residents that really didn't have that access before, at rates as low as $30 a month," Ducro said.

Commissioner Kathryn Whittington said a Storybook Trail will be installed in partnership with the Andover Public Library.

The project is in partnership with the Imagination Library, a project created by Dolly Parton.

"The Andover Public Library will have the first Storybook Trail in Ashtabula County, so we're super excited about that," Whittington said.

There will be 16-18 kiosks with displays that can be changed out for new books, she said.

"We were fortunate to get a grant from ... the Ashtabula County Foundation to pay for the kiosks," Whittington said. "The rest of the project is all in-kind donations."

The planned opening date for the trail is in October.

Whittington also spoke about the OneOhio settlement.

Whittington was elected board chair of the OneOhio foundation, which will receive 55 percent of the $808 million settlement with three opiate distributors, she said.

"We have a seat at the table," she said.

The county received its first payment from its share of the settlement, $64,340, she said.

"We, as a board, voted that the best use of that money was to put it back into our task force," Whittington said. "We are thankful for that $64,000, but the options are very minimal for that amount of money."

Commissioner Casey Kozlowski spoke about jail construction, after questions from attendees about a proposed sales tax increase that voters rejected last year. The increase would have paid for construction of a new county jail.

"We wanted to be able to create a facility that not only addresses the community corrections issue, and making sure we have the detention space, but the big issue we have with our current facility is the fact that we don't have programming space," Kozlowski said.

Some inmates just need to serve their time, but the goal of the commissioners is to make sure prisoners are productive members of society after they serve their sentences, he said.

"So with this concept, the idea was detention and programming space," Kozlowski said.

The commissioners are currently seeking alternative methods to fund the jail, including advocating for a bill that would create a funding system for jails similar to the Ohio School Facilities Commission, which helps pay for new school construction, Kozlowski said.

The commissioners also plan to apply for grant funds from the state.

"We recognize that this isn't an exciting issue that you as taxpayers want to pay more for," Kozlowski said. "I get it, but we as commissioners, this is one of our primary responsibilities."

There are minimum guidelines they need to follow on jail spaces.

"We just got our jail report back last week, and we have multiple deficiencies," Kozlowski said. "And if we don't work to address those, the state will come in and they're going to cut the number of people we can house there.

"And if they do that, what are the options? They either go into the community or we actually have to pay to house them off-site, at a per-diem rate," Kozlowski said.