Meeting of July 14, 2026

Uh please check your cell phones. Make sure they're turned off or silenced. And we'll get started. This is July 14th, 2026 Hardin County Fiscal Court regular voting meeting. So, let's begin and call this meeting to order. Roll call, please. — Squire Clem. — Here. — Squire Hicks. — Here. — Squire Meuse. — Here. — Squire Pennington. — Here. — Squire Saltsman. — Here. — Squire Thompson. — Here. — Squire Whitehead. — Here. — Squire Yates. — Here. — Judge Tall. — Here. — Next we'll have our invocation, Magistrate Thompson, and pledge of allegiance led by Magistrate Hicks. — I invite you to pray with me. Father God, uh today we uh stand before you and asking your blessing on this meeting. Uh Father, we pray that your Holy Spirit would uh dwell among us. That you'd guide us and direct us as we consider the business of uh Harden County. Lord, uh help us to make the right uh decisions on every count. Lord, uh we pray that uh

you would just bless this community, those who serve in it. Lord, um we thank you for the privilege of being able to serve. We thank you, Father, for those who've um listened to you and established such a country as this that we live in. Lord, we we pray for your continued blessing upon our nation, our state, our community here in Harden County. That you would find us faithful to you and about the work that is good and right in your eyes. Bless this meeting as we go forward in Jesus' Amen. — Amen. — I pledge allegiance — to the flag of the United States of America. To the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. — Well, again, thanks everyone for joining today. Uh it's great to see all of you here and those that uh may be watching on TV or streaming this. Uh we'll we'll uh review the agenda as

usual. Uh we'll have the minutes from the last meeting that we we vote on. We have a couple of presentations. We'll have a time for citizens concerns or comments. And then we'll have several items in our consent agenda that I'll go through item by item before we vote on those. Then we'll have our typical comments at the end. Okay, so that's the agenda today. I did have one kind of an exciting announcement that just just found out today that our EMS has been awarded 55 almost 55,000 dollars through the education and training modernization. This is through a request for application and as part of the Kentucky Rural Health Transformation. And this grant money, it's 100% grant. This grant money will be used to update training mannequins for pediatric and adult CPR training, advanced and difficult airway mannequins, enhanced AV equipment in the training

room to include cameras and microphones for virtual education, speakers and equipment for in-person education, and other training items that are necessary to provide and participate in needed initial and continuing education. So pretty excited about that. Congratulations to Mark Peterson, our director, and um and all those folks in in our EMS department. Appreciate you guys. All right, with that we'll move on then to the next item, which is approve Hardin County Fiscal Court June 23rd, 2026 minutes. Need a motion to approve. — So moved. — Second. — Okay, we have a motion and a second. Any discussion? Roll call, please. — Squire Clem? — Yes. — Squire Hicks? — Yes. — Squire Meuse? — Yes. — Squire Pennington? — Yes. — Squire Saltsman? — Yes. — Squire Thompson? — Yes. — Squire Whitehead? — Yes. — Squire Yates? — Yes. — Squire Shaw? — Yes. — Motion passes. All right. Next, we'll move to some uh presentations. Uh we'll start with engineering, uh Mark Abshier. — Hello, everyone.

— Hello, Mark. — Good afternoon. — Uh we're going to start with the first page. Uh this is just a review. Um You can kind of see what we're doing each month. And like I said before, those aren't all the responses we get. Uh these ones are take a little more time. And our inspections have gone up. Of course, it's that time of year for that, but um Now, we get to the other parts here. The Pierce Mill and Solway Bridge. Talked with the state about that. I'm going to go ahead and go for funding on those. Rather than wait for the state, cuz it could be a while longer. And we've already run into a problem with Pierce Mill. So, um we're going to go from that angle. Meeting Creek. Um like I said every time, they're still waiting on the railroad people. If you know anybody over there and you push any buttons, um they've had it since December. So, um and the state's assuring me we're still a go for January 2027 to start construction. So, um And the White Mills Bridge, uh I think that's kind of the big hot subject right now in Hardin County. Uh it's like I talked before, um we sent

off all the necessary paperwork to the consultants in Lexington. Um they're reviewing it. We I got the plans from the state for what they did in 2012, so we know what they did back then. Um and these are the kind of options I gave the consultants. Um of course option four is they're the pros. If they come up with something better than the others, um we'll look at that. And I also said that converting the bridge over to pedestrian traffic is an absolute if there's no other options at all, but we'll present you with how much money it's going to take for the other options as well to kind of look at. Um and it's kind of the whole thing in a nutshell. Um well, I looked at the 2012 stuff that they did. I looked at the before and after reports. And doing those few members did help improve the bridge a little bit, but it still wasn't considered in that good or higher quality. It was more still in a yellow kind of like watch it branch. So, it's considered it was fair after they did all that. So, we were looking at replacing two members as one of the options. We could still go that route. It might be the only one we can afford. And we'll know more on that when I get it all. And then um next is pavement analysis. I think more you know, you all know that

we've been working with Lincoln Trail on having a third party be the ones that do our review. And Michael and I went out and met with them on several occasions. Michael's met out there with them again and again on different roads. Um and they're going to redo the entire thing for us for free. Um it doesn't impact our new LARP that's going to come out. Um it's already went out and we've already submitted for, but I won't steal Michael's thunder. So, in case he wants to talk about it, but it also goes back to road resurfacing. Um we meet a lot and talk a lot about what we want to go with on these roads. So, um and then next is road safety. Um we're almost ready to pull the trigger on getting some money from the state on doing these highway safety improvement projects. Some of the stuff we can do internal, but some of the more expensive stuff we're going to push for the state to see if we can get funding for that. Um we're also doing a retroreflectivity on some of our higher safety issue roadways to kind of see where our signs are I'm meeting that. Um that was a requirement by MUTCD that we must have a method in place and be compliant on work on on these. So we're going to go back and see how many roadways um really kind of need

some more serious work. And I'm also working with Lincoln Trail on that, too, as part of our contract with them. Um public outreach, um um we did a thing through Brian kind of twisted my arm, but I did interviews with Insight Video and then talking on air with QuikTrip and then we did a streaming online streaming with somebody and it while we're doing the streaming, he pulled up our actual website. We showed people all these things you can do on there and he found the searchable website, showed people how to do it on the streaming app, so it's pretty nice to see. And then MUTCD compliance, we've got a requirement we have to have these things in place by 2027 and um that's where you do the bridge advanced tonnage. Like if you come up to an intersection, you want to give somebody their option not to go down that road before they get there and find out the tonnage isn't there. We suspect that that might have been what caused part of the issue with uh with White Mills. If somebody got down there, cuz if you look at your Google Maps for getting across, it takes you right across that bridge. And they're not going to see that till they're already way down to the end of the road if they came down through the community side, and they're not going to see it until they get make that turn. So we're going to try to address that with