By Dave Baumeister
County Correspondent
SIOUX FALLS — This week, the Minnehaha County Commission met for a monthly Building Committee meeting prior to their regular session on Tuesday, Dec. 7, and one of the topics of discussion was ballot drop boxes.
Prior to the 2020 election, the auditor’s office invested in two ballot drop boxes to help deal with the large number of expected absentee ballots.
Unless a new variant of the coronavirus pushes things back to 2020 conditions, that probably won’t be the case in 2022, but the auditor still wants to allow people to drop off absentee ballots directly to the county, as opposed to chancing regular mail delivery.
Susan Beaman with that office explained one change they wanted to make with the placement of those drop boxes in Sioux Falls.
Last year, one box was located at the entrance to the Minnehaha County Administration Building, and another was placed across Dakota Ave. at the Election Center.
Beeman said that the auditor’s office is looking to move the box from the Election Center to the Administration Building parking lot adjacent to Minnesota Ave., to allow for drive-up access.
Last year, with the placement of the two boxes, only walk-up access was available.
To address security, Beaman said that the box on the west edge of the parking lot would be behind a concrete barrier, and even though it would be covered by cameras, they felt having the box so near the busy Minnesota Ave. location would make the box even more secure.
The only question on the boxes came from Vice-Chairperson Cindy Heiberger (Commission chair Dean Karsky was absent) who was concerned about the number of parking spaces the drive-up box would take up.
Although that hadn’t been addressed, Beaman said she would keep that concern in mind in preparing the final report.
From the look of the photos presented, voters dropping off ballots to the “drive-up” box would still need to get out of their vehicles to deposit them, but they would be able to drive up fairly close to make casting their ballots more convenient.
The Building Committee also heard a presentation from Todd Flickema of the SilverStone Group on property insurance for next year.
His group, which manages the county’s property insurance has been having difficulty locking down a provider for the next term.
As Flickema told commissioners, insurance companies have been hurting due to unusually large payouts from natural disaster claims (floods, fires, hurricanes, etc.) in recent years.
Most of the companies they looked at have either declined or want to put deductibles in place of more than $100,000.
Flickema pointed out that the county’s current carrier, The Travelers, is unsure about renewal.
This year, the county is paying The Travelers over $200,000 for its annual premiums.
Flickema showed figures that Minnehaha County has only made two claims on its property insurance in the past six years: one in 2018 on a fire at the county jail for $939,851, and the second just this past summer on emergency repairs on the roof of the Sioux Empire Fair Expo Building for $155,727.
No action was taken on anything concerning insurance, but Flickema wanted to keep commissioners informed of the processes they were going through.
Regular meeting
During the regular Dec. 7 meeting, commissioners gave their approval to applying for several grants, including a $3.1 million MacArthur Foundation Urban Institute Equitable Housing Grant for which they were invited to apply.
Presiding judge of the Second Judicial Circuit Robin Houwman spoke about the prestigious nature of the grant, in that groups must be invited to apply, and those invitations come based, in part, on past community work in the areas of lowering homeless and incarceration numbers.
She said only around two dozen receive invitations to apply, and of those, only 10 are selected for an interview to receive the grants.
After the interview process, grants are awarded to four applicants.
Houwman said that if the grant would be awarded to the county, the first stage would be to establish “community partners” to determine needs and how best to implement them.
A main area of concern, she added, is to look at emergency and crisis stabilization housing.
Commissioner Jean Bender said she was “completely in support” of applying for the grant, as it would be building on work the county has already been doing.
In moving forward on this, Houwman was asking the county to be the government agency attached to the application, to which all commissioners readily agreed.
Other grant applications discussed dealt with bridge replacement work near Baltic, Dell Rapids and Garretson.
Next week, there is no regular commission meeting scheduled; however, according to Commissioner Jeff Barth, they will use that day, Tuesday, Dec. 14,to look at how to spend the $35 million in COVID-relief money the county received.
He added that there have already been around $110 million in requests for the money, so commissioners will have their work cut out for them as they go through requests.
That meeting will begin at 8 a.m.
But the next regular meeting will start at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 21, on the second floor of the Minnehaha County Administration Building at 6th and Minnesota in Sioux Falls.
There is time allotted at each government meeting for public comment.
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