July 30, 2024, Camden County Commission meeting at 10:00 a.m.

I attended the July 30, 2024, Camden County Commission meeting at 10:00 a.m.

As I ambled into the county courthouse like I was walking into Cheers, I encountered an unfamiliar deputy manning the metal detector at the entrance. He fixed me with a gimlet eye and reached for one of those little plastic baskets , imagining what treasures I was hiding in my pocketses.

“Ahem.”

I drew his attention to the fancy Commission Visitor’s Pass (marked #3, don’t know who the first two are.) that was hanging around my neck.

Checkmate.

The deputy’s disappointment was palpable. He grudgingly waved me past the checkpoint.

What a day to be a Gadfly.

My phone, keys, wallet, and a clump of Lisa Thomas mailers folded up into the shapes of tiny origami possums were still safe from prying eyes.

All three commissioners were present for the meeting.

The first agenda item was Discuss cyber security & ARPA.

This presentation covered proposed projects from Huber to improve the cybersecurity and IT infrastructure of the county.

To lead off, Presiding Commissioner Skelton mentioned that because the county recently purchased the Lighthouse Clinic building, they no longer planned to renovate the old post office. It will be used for storage.

Huber presented various project bids. I will attempt to summarize them here.

New servers: $32,762.76 Total with software and expert fiddling: $49,622.49

The current servers are 5 years old and, according to Huber, they should be replaced.

Some sort of fiber project.

New courthouse core switches in data center: $27,724.44

21 new wireless access points: $20,514.04

Migrating the county domain to a “.gov” domain name: $25,500!!!

(This bid seemed a bit high. I had some fun making comments that I was going to buy all of the camdencounty.gov domain name variations before the meeting was over. The two vendor representatives started whispering to each other that they needed to reserve the domain name as soon as possible.)

Printer security project: $13,050.

(Hopefully, this printer security project will prevent the Collector’s haunted printer from printing out creepy messages to people. Regular readers might remember “that” incident.)

After a little informal haggling from the commissioners, Huber agreed to do all of the bids they presented for $136,000! This coincidentally was exactly the amount of ARPA money that the county had available for the project.

Wow. Talk about your flexible pricing.

The second agenda item was Petition to rename county road- Calkin Cove Rd.

The owners of the property requested permission to rename Calkin Cove Road to Scharf Cove Road. They own the property surrounding the road and E-911 did not have an objection to the name change.

I’ve mentioned before that there are occasional issues with popular street signs being stolen. I think we can all rest easy knowing that the Scharf Cove Road sign will be safe and if it does turn up missing, the search party should probably check the Scharf family’s garage before calling out the hounds.

The name change was approved unanimously by the Commission.

The third agenda item was Road and Bridge Budget Amendment.

This budget amendment was needed to transfer line item money for cameras for the Road and Bridge Department.

I believe this was for the fuel pumps and gates, but frankly, I was still struggling to get autocorrect to spell Calkin and Scharf properly.

This budget amendment was approved unanimously.

The final agenda item was Library Board Reappointment- Adam Guttman.

The commissioners voted unanimously to re-appoint Adam Guttman to the Camden County Library Board.

And that was that.