Barton County Departments submit a bi-weekly activity report of statistical information or a summary of services. County Administrator Richard Boeckman presented highlights from the most recent reports to the County Commission Monday morning.
Below is a recap of the activities.

County Engineer Clark Rusco
• Met with the consultant for the Cheyenne Bottoms inlet pipe. The pre-bid meeting was held at the Front Door in Great Bend. There were over 60 sets of plans requested so far for this project. The bid opening will be in the later part of this month. He also met with a concrete pipe supplier. The project will be over five miles of 60-inch of reinforced concrete pipe, which amounts to a lot of truckloads of concrete pipe being transported through the county for this project.
• Met with Union Township officials concerning road vacates and minimum maintenance roads
• Attended Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas Conference in St. Joseph and presented information on stone bridges in Barton County.
 • Finalized contracts and issued a Notice to Prodeed to H.W. Lochner Inc., a national engineering firm with a site in Salina, for the replacement of the concrete deck expansion joints for the Ellinwood bridge over the Arkansas River.
• Finished the overlay of Railroad Avenue project.  
• Researched roadway status of proposed vacated roadways. Union Township opened almost all of its roadways in 1879 and they were nearly all 50 feet in width.

 Road and Bridge Director Dale Phillips
• Asphalt Road repairs were completed southwest of Boyd on Northwest 90 Road and north of Odin on Northeast 90 Avenue to Dubuque at the Russell County line.  
• Asphalt crews moved to Railroad Avenue and McKinley Street on Thursday, Oct. 11, for intersection asphalt repairs. On Friday, Oct. 12, moved to Southwest 30 Road to repair damaged areas in preparation for winter.
• Cleaning up rights of way with a final pass of mowing in preparation for winter weather and snow. Mowing operations are currently located in east northeast Barton County.
• Winter snow training details are being worked out.
 
 Amy Miller, emergency risk management\records
• Amy Miller, emergency management director, attended the annual Kansas Emergency Management Association in Topeka, on September 12-14, 2012. Miller attended training break-out sessions on public assistance, the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, mitigation planning and drought response.
Efficient reporting of damages is central to obtaining a Presidential declaration after a disaster and the process was examined during the conference.  
The Barton County Records Management Department had 179 visitors call, write, e-mail or walk in from Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Louisiana, Missouri, Florida and South Dakota.
• There were 258 requests for probates, birth records, criminal, civil, small claims, domestic, death and cemetery records, limited actions, marriage licenses, traffic, census, and naturalization records.
• The Oil companies continue to request information from Probates. There were the usual number of requests for Marriage Licenses for Social Security and Insurance purposes.

911 Director Doug Hubbard
• Reported there were a total of 17,532 calls to the 911 Center. Of those, 14,557 were came on the administrative lines and the rest to 911. Of the 911 calls, 723 came from cell phones and 2,252 from land lines.

County Appraiser Barbara Konrade
The Barton County Appraiser’s Office is in the process of collecting new construction data and reviewing properties that have sold. For each property that has sold, the department will verify the data on record and take a picture of the sale property. These properties assist in setting values on properties that have not sold. The department continues to ready itself for establishing the Jan. 1, 2013, values. Work will consists of reviewing properties that have sold, checking replacement cost amounts and performing market analysis. As always, county vehicles will be marked and personnel will wear picture name tags.

Information Technology Director John Debes
911 Director Doug Hubbard
• Reported there were a total of 7,149 calls to the 911 Center. Of those, 5,593 were came on the administrative lines and the rest to 911. Of the 911 calls, 1,178 came from cell phones and 378 from land lines.
• Installed and revised a program at the Health Department that is used for monitoring the temperature in the vaccine refrigerators.  
• Repairing equipment after a number of County computers were hit with a virus.  This particular virus these first appeared about five years ago in the United Kingdom and it has reappeared over the last couple of weeks in Europe.

 
Health Department Director Lily Akings
Clinic visits total, 487
Family Planning, 68
Immunizations, 325
Maternal and Infant, 10
Communicable Disease, 10
Health Start home visits, 11
 Sexually Transmitted Disease, 17
Tuberculosis, 28
The Health Department is collecting data on the flu shots given to determine the percentage of community coverage.