Meeting of February 24, 2026

It's time to get started. It's good to see everyone. Go ahead and check your cell phones if you wouldn't mind. Make sure that they're turned off, turned to silent. This is the February 24th, 2026 Harden County Fiscal Court regular voting meeting. So, let's begin and call this meeting to order. Let's have a roll call, please. — Squire Clim here. — Squire Hicks — here. — Squire Muse — here. — Squire Pennington — here. — Squire Saltzman — here. Squire Thompson — here. Scar Whitehead — here. — Square Yates — here. — Judge Hall — here. Uh, next we have a invocation by Magistrate Chris Yates and Pledge of Allegiance, Magistrate Fred Clair. — Let us pray. Heavenly Father, we come for you today with grateful hearts as we begin this meeting. Grant us wisdom in our decisions, discussions, clarity in our decisions, and unity in our purpose. Help us to serve the people of Harden

County with integrity, fairness, and compassion. We are honored to serve our constituents and ask that you guide us to lead in a way that reflects your responsibility. We also ask that you watch over the men and women who fight to keep us safe both home and abroad. Guide our actions so that they reflect what is right and just for our community. Your name we pray. Amen. I aliance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. — Again, thanks for joining today. Uh it's great to see everyone here and those watching on television or streaming. Uh just to review the agenda, it's a pretty um uh basic agenda today. We after these comments will vote and approve our February 10th minutes and

then we have a presentation uh to make. After that, there are some presentations and then we have a time of citizens concerns or comments. We do have a an ordinance, a second reading of ordinance to vote on today and approve. And then we have the consent agenda that has several items in it. And then we have the comments as usual and then adjourn. So that's our agenda for the day. Uh just one quick note. Um uh Brian Walker, our communications officer, put out a press release and just wanted to um review that real quick. And it has to do with um critical need for donations for a blood drive that's coming up next week. Uh the American Red Cross is currently facing a severe blood shortage in Kentucky and requests from hospitals exceeding the available supply. And this shortage is particularly critical for uh platelets and blood types zero not zero O A negative and B negative. So, it's uh this is happening uh with

our Harden County EMS along with Air Methods Kentucky 6. They're the ones that are hosting this blood drive with the American Red Cross. And it's again Tuesday, March 3rd, 2026 in the EMS training room right next door to this building. Okay. I just wanted to make sure uh everybody that can hear that hears it because that is something that we need to try to do. All right. Um, at that we'll move on and approve Harden County Fiscal Court February 10th, 2026 minutes. I need a motion to approve. — So move. — Second. — Moved and seconded. Any discussion? Hearing none. Roll call, please. — Squire Clim, — yes. — Squire Hicks, — yes. — Squire Muse, — yes. — Squire Pennington, — yes. — Squire Saltzman, — yes. — Squire Thompson, — yes. — Squire Whitehead, — yes. Square Yates. — Yes. — Just tall. — Yes. Motion passes. — All right. Next, we have in ourformational items, um, we mentioned it at our last meeting that, uh, we have

our EMS lifeline gold award that we have achieved. And I just want to give just a little explanation. And then what we'll do is we'll go ahead and kind of u make a deal out of that and have Mark come up and and uh present him with that award and talk about that a little bit. But um this is uh we've received this American Heart Association Mission Lifeline EMS gold achievement award and that is for our commitment to offering rapid and re in researchbased care to people experiencing the most severe form of heart attacks and strokes ultimately saving lives. The agency achieved silver status uh in 2024 and this higher honor for this past year's efforts. Mission Lifeline EMS is the American Heart Association's national initiative to advance the system of care for patients with high-risk time-sensitive disease states such as severe heart attacks and strokes. The program helps reduce barriers to prompt treatment

starting with when 911 is called to EMS transport and continuing through hospital treatment and discharge. Optimal care for heart attack and stroke patients takes coordination between the individual prehosp providers and health care systems. So this is a pretty big deal. I'm very proud of our uh EMS department and what they've been able to achieve. continuous improvement all the way and uh and we won't be satisfied with this award. We'll just keep right on going. So, Mark, do you have — I do have the award. Could we just meet up here in front if everybody could just join us so so we can maybe get a picture? — He's already promised platinum next year. — Okay. I know he's going to try. So again, congratulations to Mark and

his team. Great job. — Great job, guys. Thanks. — Thank you. — All right. Um, moving on then, we have our next agenda item are some presentations. And we'll start out with our coroner, Matt Elmore. Pat Elmore right been called worse I guess. — Yeah. Sorry about that. — Good evening judge, members of the court, members of the audience. Uh tonight and I'll roll through pretty fast. We have our 2025 annual report coming up since we are year end. Uh due to the weather, obviously we couldn't get to this earlier, but uh the corner's office handled 1193 cases for the year. Uh we're about 35 ahead of what we were last year or the year prior to that. You'll see the accident 45 homicide three natural 116 suicides 32 and pending autopsy of two and undetermined is two. Again following along with the charts you'll see 80 88% will follow that's their naturals and and so forth follows around from the previous uh screen. get into the causes of accidents, causes

of death. Overdose still leads at 51% motor vehicle collisions, then drowning and falls that resulted in in death. Suicides, our suicides were up again unfortunately this year. You'll see the method is firearm as fixy and overdose. Overdose being the second leading cause of suicide. Real briefly, this kind of gives you demographics of the suicides at at age. we track, you know, the race and gender. So, you can see males and and we follow this number last year and we noticed that the age kept getting a little further advanced. So, we there's really no way to determine what caused that. Our drug related deaths were down again this year. So, or I'm sorry, down quite a bit unfortunately this year. We still have two cases are pending. There is one item I wanted to mention on here. It's not in the slide, but there's the new drug out and you're it's starting to gain a lot of prevalence is chlor chlorophane. Um that is one that we're tracking closely that that one's kind of a scary thing. There's cases that uh this drug is basically another fentanyl derivative. It's an opioid or synthetic opioid. So um two things they don't know because it is such such a new thing in the United States. They don't know a couple things how Narcan is going