FORT SCOTT — Bourbon County commissioners will hold a work session on employee health insurance at 5 p.m. Monday, Nov. 16, after a short 4:30 p.m. meeting. Renewing the county’s current Blue Cross Blue Shield plan would cost about 14.71% more, benefits broker Don Doherty told the commission Nov. 9. He said UnitedHealthcare’s renewal is about 11% higher, while two UnitedHealthcare high-deductible plans with health savings accounts came in about 4.95% and 6.78% below the current cost.

The county now puts $925 a month toward employee-only coverage and about $1,700 a month for each of the 17 employees who also cover family members, Commissioner Mika Milburn-Kee said. She has asked the brokers to model a flat county contribution for every employee, and Doherty’s colleague Jeremy Bowman walked through scenarios with flat contributions of $1,100, $1,200 and $1,300 a month.

Chairman Gregg Motley said he would not support a change that raises premiums for employees who cover their children, such as raising a single mother’s premium by $600 or $700 a month. “I will never punish people for wanting to insure their children,” he said. “Having a vote of the majority, that’s the tyranny of the majority. They’re taking money from the minority.” Milburn-Kee replied, “I don’t think that it’s taking money from the minority. I think it’s giving an equal amount to everyone.”

Milburn-Kee asked that employees get a chance to tell the county’s HR consultant, Millie Lipscomb, what they think in private, because “some of them may be speaking against their leaders.” Commissioner David Beerbower agreed, saying employees who want to could talk with Lipscomb individually before Monday. Lipscomb said she would send her email address to department heads and would be at the courthouse two or three times that week.

Read the full story on the Nov. 9 meeting, or read the meeting transcript.

FORT SCOTT — After Bourbon County barred personal use of its property, Commissioner David Beerbower read a statement arguing that informal perks lead to perceived favoritism and resentment, and that paying taxes doesn’t make anyone an owner of county equipment.

Beerbower said on Nov. 2 that using county property as a perk can boost morale when applied fairly, but that such benefits “lack legal protection and lead to perceived favoritism and resentment.” He said, “When I was first seated, I was told about the golden six that got all the advantages because of their connection to supervision.” He did not say who they were.

He said taxpayers are stakeholders whose opinions matter, but that paying taxes does not give anyone an ownership share of a county vehicle or road grader, or authority over personnel decisions and salaries. Those duties are delegated to elected commissioners, he said, and voters hold them accountable at the ballot box.

“No single taxpayer pays anyone’s salary. Rather, all taxpayers collectively fund the services they expect government to provide,” he said.

Read the full story on the Nov. 2 meeting.

FORT SCOTT — Bourbon County Commissioner Mika Milburn-Kee told fellow commissioners on Nov. 2 to prepare for budget overages as the year closes, citing a warning that one county department could run more than $70,000 over.

Milburn-Kee said she had received an email, and believed other commissioners had too, warning about the one department budget. The sender thought the cause was personnel. The department was not named at the meeting.

“There are things that previous commissions have done to counter that. And I think it’s our responsibility to review all of those options,” she said. She said she would bring options to the commission.

The warning comes as departments are trying to track their budgets near year-end. County Treasurer Jennifer Hawkins told commissioners Oct. 26 that she couldn’t give departments accurate budget reports because seven payrolls had not hit the general ledger.

FORT SCOTT — Bourbon County Commissioner Joe Allen used the debate over the county’s personal-use policy to tell the board that the bigger issue is keeping employees.

Allen said Nov. 2 that the county has “taken away for two years” and provided nothing in return, and that workers can find better-paying jobs nearby. “We need to start buying back into these employees because we’re going to start losing them,” he said. He said he hears the concern from public works and other departments.

He said incentives don’t have to mean using a county lift for personal work. His challenge to the board is, “What can we get back? What can we start? You know, we need to get the morale back with our employees.” He added, “We’ve done nothing but continue to take away.”

“I’m 100% behind you, Joe,” Chairman Gregg Motley answered. “We need to look for ways to support these employees in legal ways.” Allen voted against the policy, which passed 3-1.

Allen repeated the point in his closing comments, saying the county needs to invest in its employees.

FORT SCOTT — Bourbon County’s tax sale will be held Tuesday, Dec. 1, at 11 a.m. at Memorial Hall, across the street from the courthouse.

County Treasurer Jennifer Hawkins told commissioners Oct. 26 that the sale normally happens in the courthouse lobby, but the attorney firm expects more bidders than the courthouse can hold. “It’s been a very long process to get to this tax sale,” she said.

Bidders must register for a bidding number in the treasurer’s office by 4 p.m. Monday, Nov. 30, and bring a photo ID. Hawkins said at the Oct. 26 meeting that people could register the day of the sale, but she has since confirmed that Nov. 30 is the deadline. The Bourbon County Monitor reported that the county’s written sale terms bar anyone who owes delinquent Bourbon County taxes, and require winning bidders to pay by cash or check before leaving, plus a $21 deed recording fee and a $100 court cost fee per parcel.

Owners can keep a parcel out of the sale by paying the delinquent taxes, so the final list may be shorter. Hawkins said the property list would be on the county’s website and available in her office.

FortScott.biz has the full list of 104 properties and a map of the properties.

FORT SCOTT — It started with two county employees helping a stranded driver. It has become a question for the Bourbon County Commission.

“Just last week we had a couple county employees pull over and help a lady change out her tire, and we used a couple of our tools to do that,” Commissioner Joe Allen said Oct. 26. Of the proposed personal-use policy, he said, “According to this policy, we can’t even do that. We can’t even be good people to citizens because it was county.”

A week later, Commissioner David Beerbower said the Kansas Good Samaritan law, K.S.A. 65-2891, primarily protects health care and certified first aid providers and does not grant general immunity to county employees. He said the key question is whether workers were acting within the scope of their employment.

Beerbower said he would submit a separate policy on roadside aid to stranded motorists for commissioners to review.

FORT SCOTT — A week after it failed on a 2-2 vote, a resolution to pay $90,139.25 from the county’s jail sales tax fund for the Bourbon County Sheriff’s Office’s new computer system passed 4-1 Monday, after the sheriff’s advisor told commissioners the office had already gone ahead with the purchase.

Commissioners also voted to use the $120,390.36 the county received from the sale of the building at 108 West 2nd Street for a one-time appreciation bonus for county employees, and heard from a resident who said he paid $113 for a records request that produced little more than a photo.

Chairman Gregg Motley presided, with Commissioners Samuel Tran, David Beerbower, Joe Allen and Mika Milburn-Kee. All five were present; Tran had been absent the previous two weeks.

Sheriff’s computer bill

The question began during the accounts payable. Milburn-Kee pointed to two large sheriff’s office charges on this week’s bills, a $16,598 server and $14,345 in computers, and asked whether they were in addition to the computers already approved. Bryan Murphy, a retired Allen County sheriff who now advises the sheriff’s office, said they were part of the roughly $90,000 the office had requested the week before, not on top of it. He said the commission had approved 12 computers and the office needs about 26 in all. Tran noted the two charges come to $30,943.

When the item came up under old business, Murphy said the office had checked with Baker Tilly, the county’s accounting firm, and was told the cost fits within the sheriff’s budget. He asked the commission instead to let the office pay it from the jail sales tax fund, which he put at about $1.899 million. The county treasurer’s quarterly report in the meeting packet shows $1,899,743.58 in that fund on Sept. 30. Milburn-Kee asked how much of the fund is already committed, and Murphy said he could not say.

“So you already spent money, so…” Beerbower said.

“Yes, we already moved forward, being that we knew that the money was in our budget,” Murphy said. “… Luckily enough, we’ve watched our P’s and Q’s, and we should be okay. But if we could get it out of sales tax, that would make us a whole lot more comfortable.” Milburn-Kee later explained that the Sheriff’s office does not have permission to use the sales tax fund, but must be granted it by the commission.

Murphy said a letter the office received from the KBI two weeks ago requires computers connected to state systems to run Windows 11, and that the office’s existing machines are too old to be upgraded. The deadline mentioned at the table was Jan. 1. He said the new provider, Advantage Computer Enterprises of Iola, bills by the visit rather than through a contract, and that Advantage has worked for the district court and the county attorney’s office for years. “We pay it by visit. If we have an issue, they come and fix it,” he said. The company’s July 22 estimate, included in last week’s packet, lists an eight-month labor contract that includes $5,000 prepaid, and a monitoring service at $11,160 a year for 29 devices.

Tran said he worried the cost would migrate into the sheriff’s budget over time, as he said was predicted when the county approved the sheriff’s vehicle leases through Enterprise. “So what stops that from happening here? What happens from you having a mission creep?” he asked. He also asked whether the county’s cyber insurance could be affected by having more than one IT provider. “My understanding is, as technology evolves, the insurance company requires one computer tech company, not two, not three,” he said. Murphy said he did not know insurance.

Motley said that installation is not included in the quote, at an estimated $200 to $250 per machine. “It’s going to be higher than this,” he said. “I’m hoping not,” Murphy said.

Beerbower moved to adopt the resolution he presented the previous week, for $90,139.25 from the sales tax fund. The total is $2,424 more than the $87,715.25 on the company’s July 22 estimate; a handwritten change on the estimate raises the desktop count from 12 to 14, which accounts for the difference. He said technology is an allowed use of the jail sales tax while other costs, such as a homicide investigation, are not, so paying for the computers from the tax protects the sheriff’s budget, and that money left over in that budget at the end of the year would go toward reducing property taxes. That point was disputed: commissioners and Murphy disagreed over where the sheriff’s year-end carryover goes, and Milburn-Kee said she doubted any savings would come back as a lower tax levy.

Before the vote, Tran said he wished the process had been more transparent. “I was never against him getting a server. And he knows that. But we never talked about how he was going to fund it,” he said, referring to Sheriff Bill Martin. Undersheriff Kevin Davidson replied that “Bill’s been up here asking to do this for a long time.”

The motion passed 4 to 1, Milburn-Kee voting against.

Last week’s discussion of the bill is here, and a breakdown of what it covers is here.

Building sale money to employee bonuses

The building at 108 West 2nd sold for $125,000, and the county netted $120,390.36 after a $3,750 real estate commission and closing costs, according to the settlement statement in the packet. Beerbower proposed using all of it for an employee appreciation bonus for every county employee except the commissioners, with part-time employees receiving half. He said he had talked with each elected official and department head except Public Works, and that the consensus was “this would be a great way for us to show appreciation to our employees.”

Motley estimated it would come to about $1,100 for full-time employees and $550 for part-time. Beerbower said Baker Tilly would calculate the exact amounts.

Allen said he was not against a bonus but wanted to see the breakdown before voting, and said some employees have asked about bringing back a Christmas dinner. Milburn-Kee asked whether some of the money might be needed for vacation payouts the county had not budgeted for this year. “The sale of that building may have just dug us out of a hole to pay a lot of those vacations out,” she said.

Beerbower moved to use the money for an appreciation bonus “pending calculations by our finance department.” The motion passed 3-2 on a voice vote, with Tran and Milburn-Kee voting against.

Records requests and Stronghold Data

Beerbower brought up the county’s handling of records requests under the Kansas Open Records Act after a resident contacted him about a request that was billed once and then billed again at a higher amount. The county’s IT contractor, Stronghold Data, began charging the county $95 an hour to retrieve emails for such requests, as fortscott.biz has reported.

The requester, Thomas Metcalf Jr., told commissioners he was first quoted $90 for five hours of work, then was told Stronghold would charge $95 an hour on top of that. He said he received the records on the eighth day, and that what he got was a photo and a screenshot of an email inbox, not the emails he asked for. He said the final invoice added $18 for an hour of an employee’s time, and that he paid $113 in all.

“So I paid $113 for a photo. I mean, that’s ridiculous,” Metcalf said. He didn’t receive anything else he requested. He said he has worked in local government for 22 years. “Put things back in-house, please.”

Tran asked who negotiated the $95 rate. Reading from emails in the packet, he said Stronghold reported spending 150 hours on 51 records requests that had been covered under its support agreement, and that Motley, the clerk and the county counselor were on an Aug. 21 email about the charges. In a later email in the packet, dated Nov. 3, Stronghold put the total at 65 requests and just over 107 hours since July 2025. Motley said Stronghold called him to say it would start charging. “They had more KORA requests for us than all the other clients combined,” he said. “Allen County has had one KORA request this year.”

County Clerk Ann Clarkson said Stronghold is the county’s contracted IT department and only it can retrieve emails. “Either way, they’re charging us, and so we either eat it or pass it on,” she said.

Beerbower read a passage he attributed to K.S.A. 45-219(c), saying the law limits records fees to the cost of the lowest-paid staff who can do the work and that passing a vendor’s hourly rate on to a requester is not allowed. He said the state puts IT labor at about $40 to $50 an hour. He proposed a single countywide records policy with an appeal process, a written record of each search, and a requirement to contact the requester when a request will cost more than $200 or take more than five hours. Motley said the clerk, as the official keeper of records, would be the natural clearinghouse. No action was taken on a policy.

Stronghold’s 2025 managed-services quote, signed by the county and included in the packet, says the company would handle email records requests “at no additional cost under a full managed services agreement.” In a Nov. 3 email in the packet, Stronghold said it would waive one outstanding records invoice as “a one-time waiver, not a change in our position,” and proposed an addendum setting $95 an hour with a one-hour minimum.

Tran moved to refund Metcalf’s fees. The motion passed unanimously; Allen went on to ask Metcalf whether his request had been fulfilled, and Metcalf said it had not.

During the item, Heather Ethridge told commissioners that Stronghold, as a private company, cannot legally bill anyone for records requests. She also said maps for some local cemeteries were destroyed in a house fire and that, as she had been told, two cemeteries cannot sell plots because the register of deeds office will not accept copies of maps or deeds. She said the register of deeds office should start accepting cemetery deeds. Motley said the commission would take it under advisement.

Health insurance work session set

Benefits broker Don Doherty and a colleague, Jeremy Bowman, presented renewal options for the employee health plan. Doherty said Blue Cross Blue Shield’s renewal of the current plan is an increase of about 14.71% and UnitedHealthcare’s is about 11%, while UnitedHealthcare’s two high-deductible plans with health savings accounts came in about 4.95% and 6.78% below the current cost. He said self-funding the plan would likely require 10% to 15% more funding and suggested a separate meeting if the county wants to consider it. He cautioned that paying employees to leave the county plan can drive up costs for those who stay and may lead to having the county’s policy cancelled.

Milburn-Kee, who has proposed a flat county contribution and extra pay for employees who do not use the county’s insurance, said at least 25 eligible employees are not enrolled, and that the county gives about $1,700 a month toward coverage for 17 employees with dependents and $925 a month for employee-only coverage. Bowman walked through six contribution scenarios, including flat county contributions of $1,100, $1,200 and $1,300 a month that Milburn-Kee had sent.

Motley said he would not support raising premiums for employees with families. “I will never punish people for wanting to insure their children,” he said. “Having a vote of the majority, that’s the tyranny of the majority.” Milburn-Kee replied, “I think it’s giving an equal amount to everyone.”

Motley said he had received the broker’s figures only that afternoon. Commissioners scheduled a short meeting for 4:30 p.m. next Monday, Nov. 16, limited to routine items, followed by a work session on benefits at 5 p.m. Milburn-Kee asked that employees have a chance to share their views privately in the week before the meeting, and Lipscomb said she would reach them through department heads before then.

Other business

• Dave May of CivicPlus, a Manhattan-based company, presented a proposal for a new county website built to meet the federal accessibility rule for government websites. The proposal includes moving 100 meetings’ worth of agendas and minutes, six training sessions for county employees, accessibility monitoring and PDF fixes. He said the quote offers 50% off first-year fees if signed by Dec. 19 and that a site would take about six months to launch. No action was taken.
• HR consultant Millie Lipscomb said she expects working drafts of a payment requisition form and a procurement policy within 30 days, and is reviewing salary ranges, job descriptions and onboarding, compiling a list of open county positions, and holding open hours for any county employee from 1:30 to 3 p.m. Thursday at the Public Works office. She plans to hold regular hours weekly in the county commission room for employees to come ask questions. She also said she wants to review whether to stop letting vendors pull payments from county accounts starting Jan. 1 to create better checks and balances.
• Milburn-Kee brought back her draft purchasing policy, which starts its quote requirements at $2,500. Beerbower said that threshold is too low and asked to see policies from other counties. Motley said he is giving policies from Miami County and Spring Hill to the county’s leadership team so employees can weigh in. A discussion between Tran and Beerbower over county credit cards grew heated before Motley returned the commission to the agenda.

  No action was taken.

• Beerbower handed out a draft request for proposals for asbestos work at the courthouse, to be reviewed in two weeks. Milburn-Kee reported that the county’s insurance pool, KCAMP, awarded a $2,000 grant toward the cost of asbestos testing. Background on the courthouse asbestos testing is here.
• Commissioners approved the accounts payable and added an $810 payment to CIC for a special payroll run that afternoon.
• The commission met in executive session for about 10 minutes to discuss the job performance of non-elected personnel, with Lipscomb present, and took no action.
• A discussion of a projected budget overage, listed on the agenda by Milburn-Kee, was not reached before the meeting’s end time and was tabled. Documents in the packet describe a projected payroll shortfall of about $77,000 in the register of deeds office. Commission comments were skipped.

The agenda for the meeting is here.

FORT SCOTT — The Care Van rides that take Bourbon County residents to medical appointments nearly lost the income that keeps them going.

“We went from about $40,000 a month in income to about $4,000 in income,” Becky Gray of Building Health Inc. told county commissioners Oct. 26. Gray said reimbursement dropped after changes in who insurers use to broker non-emergency medical rides. If the program were not part of the Community Health Center of Southeast Kansas, she said, “we probably would have closed our doors.” She said monthly income is now back closer to $30,000 to $40,000.

Gray said Care Van gave about 4,400 rides in Bourbon County in its last program year and could not fill about 400 more because schedules were full. “Essentially, you know, we’re the car. So anywhere you go in your car, people are going on our buses,” she said.

Rides are scheduled by calling 833-228-7433 during working hours. Commissioners approved a letter of support for the program’s KDOT grant.

FORT SCOTT — Bourbon County employees can no longer use county vehicles, equipment or property for personal purposes, and commissioners can’t grant exceptions, under a policy adopted Nov. 2. The vote was 3-1, with Commissioner Joe Allen voting against.

Commissioner Mika Milburn-Kee removed language that would have let the commission approve exceptions, saying that if the reason for the policy is liability, there should be no exceptions by anyone. “Everything here belongs to the taxpayers,” she said.

County Counselor Bob Johnson said a waiver wouldn’t solve it. “When you sign a waiver, you can waive liability, but you don’t waive negligence on the part of the owner, and that’s the problem,” he said.

Commissioner David Beerbower said he asked KCAMP’s risk manager whether KCAMP, the county’s insurance pool, prohibits personal use, and the answer was “absolutely.” Allen said a KCAMP underwriter was still researching his questions on liability and waivers and had not gotten back to him by the meeting. Beerbower’s amendments changed “may not be used” to “will not be used” and struck a paragraph on reporting fringe benefits.

Read the full story on the Nov. 2 meeting.