In her report to the Barton County Commission Monday morning, County Appraiser Barb Konrade said Appraiser’s Office personnel are still in the process of the annual re-inspection of real property, which includes residential, commercial and vacant properties.
Field appraisers are working in portions of Great Bend, Claflin and some areas of Hoisington. Once these areas are complete, re-inspections may be conducted in other rural portions of the county as needed.
Konrade said the office is mandated state statute to physically re-inspect all real property in the county at least once every six years. The purpose of this inspection is to verify that the data is current and represents the property accurately.
The Appraiser’s Office physically inspects approximately 17 percent of the real property located in the county each year, she said. Information will also be collected on properties with building permits and parcels that have recently sold.
The Appraiser’s Office recently mailed income and expense statements to apartment property owners. These questionnaires should be returned by Sept. 6.
Konrade said this information is kept confidential, but is needed to assist the office in establishing models to produce fair market value on similar properties.
 She stressed that staff conducting inspections will be wearing county-issued ID badges and will be in Barton County marked vehicles. If the public should have questions, they can call the Appraiser’s Office at 620-793-1821 or email at appraiser@bartoncounty.org.
The report came as part of County Administrator Richard Boeckman’s bi-weekly service update presented to the commission. Other highlights Monday morning included:

Road and Bridge Shop Foreman Gary Demel 
Road and Bridge
Emergency duties, flooding, weekend of Aug. 3 – 4
• Set up Sand Bagging Operation on South Washington, Great Bend. Three loads of sand were readied and a staff person was assigned the duty of issuing sand bags. Also deployed were pickups with signs, barricades and cones to check roads.
• Water was on and \ over the road in several places in eastern Barton County. This resulted in damages, particularly shoulder erosion.
• The City of Ellinwood received 2,000 sand bags, 50 were used on South Washington and 150 were taken to 911.
Emergency duties, flooding, week of Aug. 12
• NE 50 Road, 100 block – placed barricades and flashers due to traffic hazard
• North Washington Avenue, 200 block — sink hole in asphalt
Other Duties
Sealing, total of 95 miles
• NW 40 Avenue, 600 – 700 blocks
• NW 60 Avenue, 100 – 300 blocks
• NW 80 Avenue, 400 – 800 blocks
• NW 130 Avenue, 100 – 800 blocks
• NW 140 Avenue, 100 – 200 blocks
• NW 20 Road, 1300 block
• NW 30 Road, 200 – 700 blocks
• NW 40 Road, 600 – 1300 blocks
• NW 60 Road, 1300 block
• West Barton County Road, 500 – 600, 800, 1100 – 1300 blocks
Sign Crews
• Replaced signage due to vandalism and as needed
Additional duties due to flooding
• Removed barricades as appropriate
• Power broomed roadways to remove flood debris and mud
• Checked culverts
• Delivered additional sand bags to Ellinwood
 
Solid Waste Manager Mark Witt
In the reporting period at the Barton County Landfill:
• 1032.68 tons of municipal solid waste
• 247.12 tons of construction/demolition waste
• 634.62 tons of special waste
• 37.39 tons of contaminated grain (Kansas & Oklahoma Railroad)
• 2,411.02 tons of petroleum/chicken meal contaminated soil (Union Pacific train wreck in Hays)
• 57.54 tons of other petroleum contaminated soils
• 618 loads of waste received for disposal
• $137,765.62 revenue generated for the period
The Solid Waste staff has been busy the past couple of weeks dealing with issues related to excessive rainfall. From July 18 through Aug. 9, the Landfill received 13.97 inches of rain. The thunderstorm on Sunday, Aug. 4, produced 5.79 inches. Staff began storm water pumping operations from the main Phase 4 storm water holding area the next day, and over the next five days, pumped an estimated 6,200,000 gallons of storm water into the facility’s storm water management network.
This network consists of engineered and state approved ditches, overflow areas, a sedimentation pond and two storage ponds. The system is managed according to the Barton County Landfill Storm Water Pollution Prevention Plan approved by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, Bureau of Waste Management.
With the recent rainfall, muddy conditions have prevailed at the facility causing challenging disposal operations for both customers and staff, Witt said. Crushed concrete was applied to aid access to disposal areas, and at times, customers were only permitted to unload waste one at a time.

Emergency Risk Manager Amy Miller
The Barton County Local Emergency Planning Committee, sponsored by Barton County Emergency Management, met on July 22 and reviewed the committee bylaws and public access procedures. The bylaws were originally adopted on May 4, 1989, and were in need of updating.
After discussion, committee members approved the updated bylaws. The committee also adopted Public Access Procedures which describe how requests for information from the LEPC are to be processed. Travis Parmley described the emergency response services for hazardous materials that are available through Haz-Mat Response Inc., a local company.
Parmley detailed the company operations and told the committee that hazardous materials are anything that can have a negative impact on the environment. It does not have to be chemical based to cause problems because even too much grain in a confined area can be hazardous to the environment.
Miller continues to work on building a County resource management system through the State-sponsored Accountability System. The system allows for identification badges for responders to an emergency. Badges not only provide identification of genuine emergency responders, but also allow for accountability of all responders at a disaster scene.

Information Technology Director John Debes
• Monitoring the TTC, exchange servers and sonic wall firewall continues. During this period, the systems stopped 3,164 spam messages along with a number of viruses, intrusions and spyware attempts. It is anticipated that the Lightspeed system will be upgraded next week.
• The conversion to Nex-Tech long distance is on-going.
• Computers have been replaced for the Appraiser’s Office, the Register of Deeds and for the Sheriff’s Office.

Health Director Lily Akings
 Clinic contacts, 334
• Immunizations, 197
• Family planning, 53
• Maternal and infant, 13
• Tuberculosis, 32
• Sexually transmitted disease, 7
• Healthy Start home visits, 8
• Communicable disease, 7
• Child care licensing inspections, 7
• Adult health, 7