Tama County Administration Building, 104 W State St., Toledo, Iowa. SUN COURIER FILE PHOTO

TOLEDO – In stark contrast to the previous meeting, only about seven people showed up for the Monday, Feb. 16 Tama County Board of Supervisors meeting. Although the popular subject of public health was touched on briefly by one citizen during public comment, the supervisors had other items on the agenda to address.

One of the more interesting topics from the meeting was once again the old South Tama County middle school building. The supervisors have been exploring the idea of acquiring the building and repurposing it as the county jail. After an allotment of supervisors toured both the middle school and the Marshall County Jail, they used this time to discuss their thoughts going forward. A few different ideas were thrown out, including building onto the existing jail, building a new jail, or maintaining the status quo.

“What do our numbers look like? Numbers for the jail are trending downwards. Do we need a new jail? The jail we have right now is only 30 years old; that’s not that old for a jail. We needed more space because we were sending so many people out of county and paying a lot of money for that,” Chairman Mark Doland said. “Do the numbers right now justify even looking into building a new jail? I don’t think that they do. We need to probably look at the trend lines over the next couple of years and find out. What do those numbers look like? Why are they going down? And those kinds of things.”

At the end of the discussion, the only thing that was agreed on by all supervisors was that the old STC middle school was not a cost effective step forward. Supervisor David Turner was nominated to let school district officials know that they will be passing.

Other business

Supervisor Curt Kupka stepped in for Ben Daleske, former Tama County Engineer, and read this week’s Secondary Roads report which stated that they’ve been doing brush cutting; stockpiling road rock at Traer and Chelsea; and will look at stockpiling in Gladbrook when Traer fills up. As for current openings, Gladbrook has a motor grader position open, two truck driver positions, and one excavator position open.

Nicholas Amelon, county engineer for Iowa County, was approved to be the shared engineer with Tama County for the next six months.

The policy for secondary roads concerning GPS location was approved.

The supervisors approved the release of a forgivable mortgage.

Claims totaling $171,919.04 were approved.