MOULTRIE, Ga. — The Colquitt County Board of Commissioners approved several expenditures Tuesday night, including the purchase of an aerial photography program to assist the Board of Assessors, but it held off on a reduced project to digitize records at the Colquitt County Clerk of Court’s office.

Deed records at the clerk of court’s office are already digitized and indexed back to 1990, according to a presentation from Court Clerk Lynn Purvis at the commission’s July 20 work session. She presented a proposal at that meeting to digitize the records back to 1960 at a cost of $50,890, but that cost would not include indexing the material. The reason 1960 was chosen was because an attorney working to clarify the title of land that’s being sold has to go back 60 years under state law. 

The attorney can research the title online if the records are digitized, but if they’re not indexed, he must already know the deed book and page number where the hard copy is recorded with the clerk’s office. If the record is indexed, the attorney can search by the address of the property.

Scanning and indexing the records 1960-1990 would cost about $1.9 million, Purvis said.

Commissioners urged Purvis to continue negotiations to get the cost down.

On Tuesday, she returned with a significantly different proposal. For $49,054, she could get records both digitized and indexed, but only for the period 1985-1989.

“This [with indexing] is more useful than going all the way back to 1960, which is what the earlier quote did,” County Attorney Lester Castellow told the board.

Purvis acknowledged a desire to continue adding records as money is available.

“Hopefully we’ll be able to come back next year and do five more years,” she said.

The Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax approved in 2002 included $250,000 for a records repository, County Clerk Melissa Lawson said. Digitization of the county clerk’s records took approximately $50,000 to $60,000 of that. The remainder is being used for county and clerk of court records going forward and to go back and digitize existing clerk of court records. Purvis’s proposal would be paid for with some of that money.

A concern expressed during the meeting was how far the SPLOST funding would go if the digitization project kept coming back year after year.

“We might have another three or four iterations on it,” County Administrator Chas Cannon said.

Commission Chairman Denver Braswell urged commissioners to table the proposal and think it over until the next meeting, a work session scheduled for Aug. 24.

Commissioners did agree to pay for several other expenditures, though, including a contract with EagleView for aerial photography.

Kevin Lamonds, EagleView’s district sales manager, presented a proposal at the commission’s June 1 meeting. In it, he showed how the photography could be used by the Tax Assessor’s Office to do much of their surveying without having to go to the property. The images would be associated with QPublic, a website that’s freely available to the public, so anyone would be able to view them. Lamonds said the images are also very useful to law enforcement when they’re planning an operation.

The cost of the package Lamonds proposed would be $55,780, divided over three years.

Cannon continued negotiating details of the package, and on Tuesday the Board of Commissioners voted to accept a contract at the cost of $49,580. 

During his June 1 presentation, Lamonds speculated that flights would take the photographs in January 2022, and delivery of the images would take about 45 days after the flights.

In other action Tuesday, the board:

• Nominated Maureen Yearta and Jason Jacobs to the Colquitt Regional Hospital Authority. The authority had asked for three names to consider and will choose from among the nominees. Yearta is a sitting member of the board but her term is about to expire.

• Approved the receipt of excess funds from the Department of Family and Children Services. The county helps to fund DFCS. At the end of the fiscal year June 30, the state agency had not spent almost $7,400 that the county had allocated, and the board of commissioners requested that it be returned to the county.

• Approved a $113,949 maintenance agreement for the Emergency Medical Service. The six-year agreement with the Stryker company includes 17 or 18 pieces of equipment made by Stryker.

• Approved the county’s contribution of $938,488 to its defined benefits program through the Association County Commissioners of Georgia. 

• Approved payment of $17,237 to ACCG following an audit of the county’s workers compensation plan. ACCG, the workers comp provider, bills the county at the beginning of the fiscal year based on the county’s estimated payroll. At the end of the fiscal year, it audits the actual payroll; some years the county has to pay more and other years it gets a refund based on the results of the audit, Lawson said.

• Approved monthly invoices, including $8,865 from the county attorney.

• Agreed to purchase two rolling bridge jacks from Advance Auto Parts at a cost of $5,576.48 and a four-post lift also from Advance Auto Parts for $15,323.49. Both were the low bids for the items. Together the lift and the jacks enable the county maintenance department to set up a second station to work on county vehicles. 

• Approved a bid of $7,700 for a tilt bed trailer from Bishop Trailers, the lowest of three bids.

• Approved a redrawing of property lines at 140 Pineview Ave. The lines date back to the 1960s when three adjacent lots were all owned by one person, Compliance Officer Justin Cox said. At some point the owner built a house that straddles one of the property lines. The properties have since been sold. The county resolution will allow a “land swap” between two of the current landowners so that all of the house is within one person’s property.

• Rezoned 1910 Ellenton-Omega Road from agricultural to commercial (C-2). The lot currently houses a convenience store/restaurant/auto repair facility that existed before the county’s zoning law was approved in 2007. Cox said it was grandfathered in as an existing use. The occupant now wants to sell automobiles at that location, Cox said, and that would require a different zoning. He said another benefit would be to “clean up” the county’s zoning map because the existing use of the building should have been in a C-2 zone anyway.

• Heard from Gwendolyn Knighton, an employee of the county’s E911 Center, who urged them to provide incentives for people in that department during the coronavirus pandemic. Dispatchers are having to work in close quarters with one another, she said, and recently an ambulance crew has been housed at the 911 Center. Those EMTs have to interact with people in the community who might be sick and risk bringing the illness into the dispatch center, she said. Commissioners delegated the issue to Cannon for consideration.

• Heard from Helene Gomulka, a Moultrie resident who is concerned about stray animals in the community. Gomulka had spoken with the Moultrie City Council earlier and joined the Board of Commissioners meeting afterwards. She praised improvements at the Humane Society but lamented that the animal shelter is full. She said packs of dogs are still roaming some areas of the city but even if they’re captured, there’s no place to take them. She suggested the county provide vouchers for pet owners to get their animals spayed or neutered, or possibly even to pay them to do so the way New York City has begun paying people to get the COVID vaccine.