After four months, the State Tax Board has approved Kosciusko County to go ahead with their bond issue for the Justice Building expansion project.

County commissioners' attorney Mike Miner said he received notice of the approval Dec. 23. The state has approved the county to enter into a lease with the Kosciusko County Justice Building Expansion Corp. for a maximum of 25 years with an annual maximum lease of $1.9 million per year, he said.

The bonds will have to be issued before the construction can begin to provide the county with the funds for the project. Miner said Umbaugh & Associates, Plymouth, will assist with the bond sale.

According to commissioner Avis Gunter, the county can now go ahead with the project. The old buildings on the corner of Lake and Center streets can be torn down and preparations for the expansion can commence.

Interest rates "have gone up. If they had been approved in August, we would have been better off, but we're just happy they approved it," Gunter said today.

Timothy A. Brooks, chairman of the state tax board, said today, "The delay was due to problems with the information the county provided on the common prevailing wage." He said the state requested and received from the county additional information and it took some time to review that information. After reviewing it, Brooks said, everything now seems to be in order.

Although it is not common for the process to take this long, he said, it does happen.

"The state tax board can generally take up to three months and can extend that up to six months," he said.

In November, the Kosciusko County Commissioners sent a letter to the State Board of Tax Commissioners asking when the bond issue for the project would be approved. The local tax board approved the bond issue in August.

Brooks said a three- to four-week turnaround is possible only under optimal circumstances where everything relating to the project is in order.

However, Brooks said, everything was not in order for the Justice Building expansion project. He said that based on the county-provided documents, it appeared that a determination of the most commonly paid non-union wage was made and then treated as the common wage for the county. He said the county representatives didn't consider whether the most common union wage was more common than the non-union wage and that there was insufficient data to substantiate their reasoning.

County officials disagreed, stating that their representatives on the prevailing wage committee did their work. Auditor-elect Sue Ann Mitchell said the state's representatives had errors in their numbers and those numbers were identified as such by the representative. The county representatives on the common wage council, Mitchell said, did consider the other wages presented and it was apparent in the minutes that those wages were considered.

Tony Mroczkiewisz, South Bend Carpenter's Union, said today that the union had several hundred pieces of documentation to back up their proposed wages. However, he said, the local representative didn't have any. And, he said, the state had only one wage error, which he tried to explain.

A common wage committee is "a requirement that for public projects, a determination be made for the common wage in the locality the project is in. There are three different categories - skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled," according to Miner.

The holding company has two representatives on the committee, the commissioners have one, the union has a right to a representative and the state has a representative.

When contractors bid for the project, the prevailing wage is the minimum wages the contractors can pay for the various project jobs. However, a skilled electrician's minimum wage can be different from a skilled mason's minimum job. [[In-content Ad]]