May 13, 2025, Camden County Commission meeting at 10:00 a.m.

I attended the May 13, 2025, Camden County Commission meeting at 10:00 a.m.

All commissioners were present.

The agenda was amended to include the bid openings from a previous meeting and add a discussion of amendments to the purchasing policy.

The first new item was a bid for Sheriff’s vehicles.

There was a single bid from ESU Pursuits. The vendor was a pre-approved Missouri State Bidder and the bid was approximately $151,000 for two Chevy Tahoes.

The Sheriff recommended approval of the bid and the Commission accepted the bid unanimously.

The second new item was for the jail showers.

The shower pans in the jail showers have failed and they are leaking water.

The first bid was from Profinish Painting 1 for $359,000.

The second bid was from Stonhard for $88,499.

The commissioners were concerned about the disparity between the bid amounts and they thought the second bid might be per shower pod?

The Commission unanimously tabled this item so the Maintenance Department could review the bids and get to the bottom of this mystery.

The third new item was the bids for the new generator for the Sheriff’s building and the Criminal Justice Center.

A long list of companies were notified to bid on this project. Three bids were received.

Norton Power Systems for $378,060.

Reinhold Electric for $346,480.

Total Generator Service, Inc. for $400,525.50

The Commission voted to table this item for review by the Maintenance Department.

The fourth new agenda item was the discussion of an amendment to the county purchasing policy to allow for the routine purchase of expendable and consumable items without the need for a purchase order. The Sheriff’s Office was pushing for the change because certain items such as food for the jail had to be purchased monthly and those types of supplies needed the flexibility of invoice procurement.

The Commission agreed to amend this policy and it was decided that the Sheriff’s Office and the County Auditor could collaborate to determine which specific supplies would be exempted from the purchase order requirement.

The final agenda item was the only item that had actually been listed on the initial agenda for this meeting: “LEST II – Discussion with Auditor and Sheriff.”

This has been discussed at length during more Commission meetings than I can count. According to the County Auditor, he plans to separate the Sheriff’s Office into its own County Fund. This will allow them to receive their share of the LEST1 and other county revenue while ensuring that they alone receive the sales tax money from the LEST2 quarter cent sales tax. This should take a few weeks since an entirely new Fund has to be established in the budget system with its own Appropriations and Revenue line items.

It was also mentioned that the Missouri statute for the LEST, RSMo 67.582, was found to be unconstitutional in 2002 because it was passed as part of an omnibus bill that violated the clear title requirement of the Missouri Constitution.

(If you’re not aware of this issue, Missouri bills cannot contain more than one subject and that subject must be clearly expressed in the title. The exceptions to this are general appropriations bills and certain bond issues. Has this prevented the Missouri Legislature from passing omnibus bills? Surprisingly, no. In fact, they did it again this year and they do it almost every year, but they have to be sued to stop them on individual items.)

Presiding Commissioner Skelton finally left in frustration and went to the Clerk’s Office to get a copy of the ordinance the Commission had voted on to enact LEST2. According to the ordinance, the statute used for the LEST2 ballot language was actually RSMo 67.547.

(This was a sales tax statute that had been, in the finest tradition of bizarre Missouri statutes, tailored to provide sales tax increases for zoological purposes in Saint Louis County and a separate special description for a shared sales tax increase share in New Madrid County. As usual, they never explicitly name the specific counties but instead they vaguely describe Saint Louis County as “any first class county having a charter form of government and having a population of nine hundred thousand or more” and New Madrid County as “any county of the second classification with more than nineteen thousand seven hundred but fewer than nineteen thousand eight hundred inhabitants.”

Fortunately, this statute IS constitutional and appears like its ballot language could be appropriate for a wide variety of sale tax increase purposes. Good old Charlie McElyea for the win. And maybe we can get a Camden County Zoo by the Grand Glaize bridge while we’re at it.)

In the end, it appeared that the Auditor is moving forward with allocating a separate fund to the Sheriff’s Office and its affiliated departments. The other criminal justice system departments will be left in the LEST Fund which will hopefully be named something other than “LEST” to avoid any future confusion.

Sheriff Edgar did express concern that the collected and unused LEST2 amounts from prior tax years needed to be calculated and returned to the LEST2 fund. That might be able to happen once his department has its own budget that is segregated from the rest of its law enforcement partners.

And that was that.