The Morgan County Board of Commissioners discussed a broad agenda of concerns during its May 20 meeting.
The FY26 budget was the primary focus of the meeting, with the board showcasing the budget proposal to the public.
The FY26 budget report proposes a total budget of approximately $49.6 million for the county, which is roughly $7 million less than the original FY25 budget of approximately $56.8 million.
County manager Adam Mestres began the presentation by discussing the budget requests for multiple job positions throughout the county.
The budget affected jobs in multiple departments, including the Tax Commissioner’s office, Sheriff’s office, Recreation Department, and Extension office.
“We’re recommending four of the nine requested [positions] for the sheriff’s office with an additional $36,741 allocated to increase the pay of four already employed detention center employees to promote them to court,” Mestres said. “So, within the department, we can promote four detention deputies to the rank in place of four additional positions.”
According to Mestres, personal salary and benefits changes would include increased health insurance. He said he found this especially important because there are more sick employees in some years than in others.
“Sometimes, people are sicker than they were the previous year, and so we experienced that this year,” Mestres said. “To make up for that, there’s a $555,079 increase that we need to put in.”
The FY26 budget includes $2,146,953 in salary and benefits. The budget will also feature an additional $800,000 for management and operations (M&O) purposes, totaling $2,945,464.
The proposed budget would also help the sheriff’s office hire more on-site medical staff at the Morgan County Detention Center.
Chief Deputy Jason Welch addressed the board on the sheriff’s office's plans to implement these changes. He believes that this move would help the county save money by decreasing hospital visits.
“Having medical staff on site on the weekends is going to benefit our hospital visits, which are currently kind of rampant,” Welch said. “The hospital would be far more expensive due to standard hospital fees, ER visits, and EMS visits.”
According to Welch, the proposed budget would also help the sheriff’s office hire a mental health clinician and increase the number of doctors visiting the site.
“Our former doctor was coming about once a month,” Welch said. “If we were to go with this plan, [the new doctor] would come once a week, which is going to reduce hospital send-outs, as opposed to once a month when the condition could have far worsened over time.”
The BOC also discussed its plan to purchase Placer AI software to address multiple community needs.
“There’s a shared consensus that this software will be extremely valuable to the county for an upcoming comprehensive plan update, traffic studies, economic development initiatives, and assessments of the economic impact of various events,” Mestres said. “Placer AI might be a little scary, but it utilizes mobile device location analytics to provide insights such as event attendance, visitor origins, destinations, duration of visits, traffic volume, and estimated sales tax impact.”
According to Mestres, the software categorizes audiences into groups, such as visitors, residents, and employees, allowing for a more targeted analysis based on its findings. Placer AI, therefore, utilizes publicly available data from audience cell phones to track their activities.
“There’s no doubt we can make many informed software decisions for $23,000 annually,” Mestres said. “[Placer AI] is open anywhere in the United States, which is pretty neat because it just gives us a lot of tools to be successful in the future with many different things.”