County projects moving forward
Jul. 7—Ashtabula County has a number of projects in the works and they are progressing well.
Ashtabula County Commissioner Casey Kozlowski said the county's upgrade of its CourtView court records system is progressing.
The project was approved by the county data board recently, and the commissioners approved a motion for legal counsel for the project.
"We hope to have the legal taken care of in the next few weeks on that, so that we can move forward with that project and execute those contracts," Kozlowski said. "But even from that point, we're probably about two years away from full implementation of that software."
Kozlowski said the project will provide greater public access to documents and help improve court efficiency.
The upgraded software will allow people to view court documents online.
"You'll be able to see a lot of what they can see behind the scenes, but that isn't available publicly, without you asking for the public copy," Kozlowski said. "They don't have the availability to have it all uploaded, for it to be accessible, with their current software. This will provide it in a form where they'll upload it and you'll be able to also have access to the public documents."
Currently, anyone seeking to view copies of court documents must reach out to the county Clerk of Courts office to ask for a copy.
County leadership is also planning on going out to bid on improvements to the KeyBank building recently purchased by the county, Kozlowski said.
"The city of Ashtabula has been doing their work to acquire their buildings, and they'll be vacating that hopefully by the end of the year," he said. "Then we hope to go to bid, fingers crossed, in the near future, for some improvements that will need to be made to that building, to make it fully compliant with the Supreme Court to operate both as the resource center and the juvenile court."
The county is also working on an addition project to the Ashtabula County Department of Job and Family Services offices.
"We were successful in getting the bonds taken care of, so now we're going to fine-tune the architectural estimates and get that out for bid," Kozlowski said.
A project to create new, unified signage for the county offices in Jefferson will likely also be put out for bid soon, he said.
Ashtabula County Administrator Janet Discher said the county's investment income has gone up significantly for this year, bringing in almost as much income in the first six months of the year as it was projected to generate in the entire year.
"Our yearly estimate for interest income, for example, is $1 million for the general fund, and year to date, we've already brought in $900,071," Discher said.
Funds from the local government fund are up as well, though not as much as interest income, and sales tax is up very slightly, she said.
"We're still comfortable with our estimate of $13,300,000," Discher said. "We're at 51 percent for that.
"Overall, revenue's good. On the expense side, everybody's really holding their own," she said. "Most general fund departments are in-line with their respective revenue estimates."
County departments are living within their means for the most part, working within their budgets.
"There's nothing unusual that is standing out on the expense side for the general fund," Discher said.
Action is expected to be taken soon on the county's signage project, which would create unified signage throughout the county complex in Jefferson.
"Things are pretty decent here," Discher said.
