County rejects low bid on sign project

Opting to go with a familiar and reliable provider instead of a slightly lower bidder, county commissioners voted Monday to accept a $36,968.70 bid from National Signs of Ottawa for replacement road signs in the southeast portion of the county.

The contract is part of a multi-year effort, with a total price of nearly $300,000, to replace all road signs in the county.

D.C. Wholesale of Pretty Prairie had bid $800 less, but road and bridge supervisor Jesse Hamm had to correct a problem with its bid and reported that, in past, D.C. had delivered signs much more slowly than National had.

Commissioners also:

• Approved writing off $6,724.87 in ambulance billings that insurers or patients would not pay.
• Heard that the state had validated county property appraisals by statistically comparing them to actual sales.
• Gave paramedic Larry Larsen of Peabody a 1.7 percent pay raise to $15.25 an hour because he had been on the job for six months.
• Discussed at length various options about the road and bridges department’s pickup trucks, six of which have more than 200,000 miles on them and two of which are out of service with blown engines or transmissions.
• Heard complaints from sheriff Rob Craft about the jail’s heating and cooling system, which he said can run heating and cooling within the same day.

“It’s nonstop,” he said. “It never shuts down. In July we’re running the air conditioning and all of a sudden I feel the heat.”

The original vendor no longer works with the jail’s overall operating system.

Craft also said deputies were having trouble downloading squad car video for attorneys in criminal cases.