Meeting of September 26, 2023

and time to get started again good afternoon and we'll just welcome everyone all the elected officials that are here and appreciate you and our department heads and of course our staff that are here I appreciate all that all that you guys do um of course any of our citizens that are here will have an abundance of you here today but I appreciate those of you that are here and uh and interested in your local County government again just a typically say something about the cell phone so if you've got those if you don't have those turned off or on vibrate you might want to do that all right so this is the September 26 2023 Hardin County Fiscal Court regular voting meeting and so let's begin and call this meeting to order okay I'm gonna have a roll call Squire Clem Square Hicks here Squire Muse here Squire Pennington here Squire Saltzman here Squire Thompson here Squire Whitehead here Square Yates here judge

tall here next we'll have our invocation by magistrate Aaron Pennington Pledge of Allegiance magistrate Kenny Muse if you'd stand with him father God we just thank you for allowing us to gather today Father we just ask that you would be with all of us who are making decisions father just guide our hearts and our minds and allow us to do everything that's pleasing to you father just uh we continue to thank you for those men and women that are serving and protecting our country we ask that you always keep them in our Forefront thoughts father just ask you now and bless this time Jesus name we pray amen amen thank you congratulations to the flag of the United States of America indivisible with liberty and justice for all all right just a few opening comments again thanks again for joining today we don't have a real extensive agenda today so um I'm going to take long to go through it the typical things at the beginning

and have our minutes to uh to approve from the last meeting we've got several presentations to go through and of course we'll have some time for any citizens concerns or comments we have one ordinance a second reading to to approve and then we have some items in our consent agenda and then our typical comments at the end so um just one I didn't want to make one comment about the last meeting we had some concerns some comments regarding the resolutions ordinances maybe not being were not available for the citizens to look at to make comment if they want to or to be to understand what we're getting to vote getting ready to vote on so we looked at that there was one suggestion that helped make this decision it was basically having a watermark draft on on the uh what in essence are unsigned resolutions in the ordinances

so make sure that if if something was printed out then it would have that watermark on it saying it's a draft so I think that was very helpful and so we decided to proceed with that the it may be a little confusing at this point we'll have to figure out something better but the the agenda where it's posted right now for anybody to see anybody in the public can see it on our website and just go under the tab of transparency and then you find I believe it's uh uh let's see it's where is it at it's a transparency drop down and then a physical Court agendas it's like the third item down and you can click on that you'll see the latest agenda and I think it was yesterday that we were able to get those the links available for you to see the resolutions and ordinances the drafts were available to see also any of the of the department and office reports were also available for you to look at too and you could you could review those before the meeting so that has been done and so it's out

there working and we'll continue to to improve upon it but just wanted to make sure that anybody that's in here that's interested in that and anybody that may be watching at a later time or right now that you know that that's available to you on the Hardin County website and uh just another quick comment too I think that it would be worthwhile to discuss some of you may have seen some reports on TV and on a News Enterprise and various different places where the there was a a report that was released that the Hardin County Chamber of Commerce and Industrial Foundation others were part of putting it together it took about a year or so and they released some of their findings and some recommendations so we're going to try to get some of that information again out on the website uh for anybody in the public to to see those just a few items that I thought were interesting

most everybody understands that this the and this is a response basically to the uh to blue oval to and and all the jobs that are coming our way in Hardin County and what what does that look like for Hardin County over the next um three to five years and so that's that's pretty much what this report was providing for us to look at and start to plan for it so we've already been planning for some of it but this gonna provide some numbers uh some estimates that are out there one of course is that we're already familiar with is 5000 Battery Park jobs estimated by the end of 2026 the plant payrolls 265 million dollars estimated um Hardin County will remain is predicted to remain the sixth largest county and Elizabethtown may very well become the fifth largest county or city in the in the state of Kentucky there are anticipated population growth in Hardy County of about 22 000 people 22 000

people so um that's um hard to imagine right now but it's coming our way so I'll see anything else in here eight thousand almost nine thousand new housing units are needed in Hardin County there's I I think mayor Gregory mentioned in Elizabethtown there's about four thousand that are already developers already either started on or have started the process it's so I think in housing we may be pretty good at least for um you know for multi-level apartments and such I'm not sure about homes out in the county on a piece of property uh if if we're going to have availability the availability that we may need there so a lot of a lot of work to go a lot of work to do there um as far as I think it's got in here yes uh 75 new hospital beds uh 389 new hospital jobs

380 new ambulatory care jobs and about 4 000 new K through 12 students coming our way so anyway just wanted to give you a few statistics that came out of that there's there's recommendations there's all kinds of information available now to review and we'll we'll be reviewing all of that with all of our magistrates and department heads and and trying to stay on top of that and making plans going forward already looking at each of the Departments and what their anticipated growth would be to to be able to handle including the jail you know unfortunately that may include some some growth there so every every part every service of the county will be affected by this and so what does that look like in trying to get a try to get a handle on that so a lot of work to do there just want to kind of give you an update about that since that just came out recently all right we'll move on to the next item of business here approve the Hardin County Fiscal Court