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County will apply for safety grant to straighten Hwy 249
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By Charlie Warner
Argus News Editor
“It’s not a state aid road, so we wouldn’t get any money from the state any other way. I think we should apply for the grant and see if we can get the money,” said Houston County Commissioner Dave Corcoran during the Jan. 29 county board meeting. Corcoran was refering to a grant program County Highway Engineer Marcus Evans had brought before the board.
According to Evans, the state has a program in place that pays 90 percent of the cost to make county roads and highways safer. The program includes certain criteria, which Evans feels a 1.2 mile stretch of County 249 just east of Caledonia, would meet. The 1.2 mile section of 249 has four sharp curves that have produced five high severity accidents and five property damage accidents in the past 10 years.
The grant application Evans felt the county should make would straighten out the two big “S” curves, and also take out several dips in the road at an estimated cost of $700,000.
There’s a pot of money out there, and if we don’t apply for it, someone else will. I feel this project could improve the safety of that road, and we should go for it,” Evans said.
The county board unanimously approved a motion to have Evans develop and submit the grant application.
In other board action:
County moves ahead
with warning system
The county board set up a five-person committee to review several different vendors offering county-wide emergency notification phone systems, and to develop a county policy for the system.
The five-person board includes Emergency Management Services Coordinator Kurt Kuhlers, Sheriff Doug Ely, Public Health Nursing Director Deb Rock, Highway Engineer Marcus Evans, and County Commissioner Tom Bjerke.
Kuhlers presented the county board with information on a county-wide warning system at the Jan. 22 meeting.
“In reviewing the flash flood event of August 2007, the single biggest issue was warning people of the impending danger,” Kuhlers said. “We couldn’t physically get the word out to people. A system like this would have made a very big difference.”
Kuhlers reviewed a system called CodeRED, which is offered by Emergency Communications Network of Ormond Beach, FLA. The cost, according to Kuhlers, would be $10,000 per year, which would provide the county with 30,000 minutes of notification time.
The CodeRED system can be activated to send a message out to all of the 9,800 households and businesses in the county with land lines, or any specific area, through Internet mapping capability for geographic targeting of calls when a more localized warning needs to be issued. Persons with cell phones can register their numbers as well and be part of the system.
The CodeRED system can be accessed from any Internet connection, and monitors how many persons picked up their phones to listen to the message, and how many answering machines recorded the message.
The system offers five administrative accounts, giving five different individuals or departments access to the system.
Kuhlers said he looked at three different companies that offer this type of system and felt CodeRED was the best system for the money. He said the closest community currently utilizing CodeRED is Onalaska, which put the system in place this past November.
Several commissioners felt other systems should be looked at before choosing one and decided to establish a committee to do so.
You can contact Charlie Warner at
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