Bartholomew County Council members are cutting back on the council meeting schedule, and have no meetings scheduled for February.
In November, council members hinted that they might not have two monthly meetings, one a work session where no votes are taken, and one official session where members vote. That schedule has been followed for more than a decade.
Work sessions scheduled for Dec. 2, Jan. 6 and Feb. 3 were canceled. Council meetings set for Feb. 11 and Feb. 18 have also been canceled.
There are a number of reasons why the council has cut back on its meetings, said Council President Matt Miller. Since the 2020 budget didn’t go into effect until the first of January, it was too early for any county department to start having financial matters requiring council action, Miller said.
He also said work sessions will resume when they are needed, and monthly council meetings will likely resume soon.
“If we have a lot of people wanting additional money in January and February, we’ve got real big money problems,” he said.
From a historical perspective, council work sessions are relatively new, he said. They didn’t begin until about 12 years ago when then-council president Larry Fisher began scheduling them, Miller said.
Now retired, Fisher said he initiated work sessions because regular council meetings were lasting four to five hours every month without them.
The lengthy meetings were largely due to council members being unfamiliar with facts pertaining to an agenda item, Fisher said during a telephone interview.
“Work sessions gave council members the opportunity to discuss the nuts and bolts of a proposal, so each would know what they were walking into during a regular meeting the next week,” Fisher said.
Those work sessions became especially important from 2013 to 2017,when a majority of council members refused to raise taxes while dealing with a fiscal crisis, Miller said.
“When money became that tight, council members didn’t have a full idea of how much money they had to spend,” Miller said. “In the past, we also had some trust issues (between some elected officials), but I think we’ve overcome that.”
In 2018, a 40% hike in local income taxes went into effect, approved by county council members.
With additional revenue, county officials had fewer reasons to argue over money and the length of council meetings immediately became noticeably shorter.
Council members have also frequently praised the staff of Bartholomew County Auditor Pia O’Connor for providing thorough and easy-to-understand information on agenda items.
As a result, formal council meetings were too often becoming a replay of the work session held the previous week, Miller said.
“While the information may benefit those in the audience who did not attend the work session, the subject matter often became redundant and mundane for the council,” Miller said.
However, cancelling a regular February council meeting is unusual for the council. Members were originally scheduled to discuss a Bartholomew County Sheriff’s department retirement plan during the Feb. 3 work session, as well as a regular council meeting, but Sheriff Matt Myers asked that the matter be postponed, Miller said.
While two other agenda items dealing with placing grant monies into proper channels were also on the agenda, neither agenda item requires immediate action, so a decision was made to postpone all business until March, Miller said.
Although the county is financially healthy, the council will attempt to remain as frugal as possible with public funds for the rest of the year, in order to save for multi-million dollar projects like new heating, air conditioning and ventilation units at the jail, as well as exterior work on the courthouse, Miller said.
More consistent meetings will be called as the council begins to prepare themselves for developing the 2021 budget this summer, Miller said. In the meantime, each council member is still working for their constituents as each serves on as many as four different committees, he said.
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The Bartholomew County Council will meet for a work session on Monday, March 2 and a regular meeting on Tuesday, March 10. Both meetings will begin at 6 p.m. inside the Bartholomew County Governmental Offices, located at the corner of Third and Franklin streets.
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