New jail nears completion
BENTON - Those waiting for a chance to look over the new Scott County jail may soon be able to mark their calendars and make their plans.
With the new county jail nearing completion, Scott County commissioners and Sheriff Bill Ferrell discussed plans during Tuesday's county commission meeting to schedule an open house. A date will be announced at a later time.
Commissioners first opened communications equipment bids for the new jail and scheduled one-hour meetings with each of the three bidding vendors to go over their bids in detail.
Commissioners will meet today with Dittronics Two-Way Radio of Benton at 1 p.m.; JCS/Tel-Link of Cape Girardeau at 2 p.m.; and G&D Communications of Sikeston at 3 p.m.
If after reviewing the bids county officials are unable to make a decision, they have an outside source lined up to advise them.
The bid to equip the new jail with computers was awarded to the low bidder, Microcomputer Services of Sikeston, which offered 10 desktop computers, one notebook computer, three printers, one server and a router for $25,500.
Also bidding to supply the computer equipment was Data and Stuff of Benton which bid $27,465.
Commissioners then awarded the bid to install the phone system for the new jail and run required cable from the sheriff's office to ESI of Sikeston as the bids were all so close and ESI was the vendor which recently installed the courthouse phone system.
Also bidding on the phones were Advanced Business Systems of Dexter and Hi-Tech Communications of Sikeston.
In other Scott County commission business:
* Sales tax revenue has exceeded expectations for the year ending only about $9,000 less than collected last year, according to Commissioner Jamie Burger. "That's better than what we expected."
The year's total was $1,483,369 as compared with the $1,492,314 collected in 2001. Officials had predicted only collecting $1.4 million in the budget.
December's total was $153,354. In December 2001, the county collected $157,152.
* Commissioners are planning repairs to three bridges on County Highway 268 near Perkins.
The first bridge, which commissioners will have removed and replaced, will be the one furthest west and closest to Perkins. Road and bridge crews will remove the existing bridge "as early as Thursday, depending on the weather," Burger said.
The other two bridges will be widened and repaired.
The bridge on County Highway 427 south of Morley was opened Tuesday with a chat surface, according to Presiding Commissioner Martin Priggel. "We'll have to wait till next spring to put the blacktop layer on."