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Brooks Construction was awarded the bid for the county’s Community Crossings Matching Grant (CCMG) project by the Kosciusko County Commissioners on Tuesday.
In recommending Brooks Construction for the bid award, Kosciusko County Highway Department (KCHD) Assistant Superintendent Troy Kintzel said that on March 24 the KCHD received an award for the CCMG from the state of Indiana.
Bids were opened on March 24 and taken under advisement, and included Brooks Construction for both roads at $1,606,528.23, while the bid from Phend & Brown was $1,627,647.25.
Tuesday, Kintzel said they wanted to award the bid to Brooks Construction, Fort Wayne, as they were the lowest bidder. The commissioners accepted the recommendation by a vote of 3-0.
Commissioner Sue Ann Mitchell said, “The good part about that is that it came in under the engineer’s estimate.”
Kintzel said that was correct. The bids came in between $400,000 and $500,000 below the engineer’s estimate.
The grant dollars will be used for Armstrong Road, from the bridge in Oswego to Old 15, and Packerton Road, from CR 400S into Sarah Drive.
Kintzel also presented to the commissioners a Motive agreement for $9,655.20 annually for three years.
He said it’s what they use for GPS coordinating on the highway department’s new trucks and diagnostic software “so if one of our trucks breaks down, we have a location of where our drive is and how we can get to them, like in the winter. And, also, if there’s a red flag, it’ll email our shop foreman and give him the code of what’s going on and then we can diagnose his truck from our shop instead of sending our mechanics out with no idea of what’s going on out there.”
It’ll also help the highway department be able to tell a member of the public where a snow plow driver is at a certain time, or when he’ll be by their address or if he’s already been by there, if the person needs to get to a doctor’s appointment or other scheduled event.
“If they need to get out, we can contact them and say, ‘Hey, someone’s got a medical condition and needs to get to the hospital or doctor appointment,’ so we can get them there sooner than later so they can take care of that issue,” Kintzel explained.
The commissioners approved the contract with Motive.
In other business, the commissioners approved:
• A request by Kosciusko Economic Development Corporation (KEDCO) for $180,000 in special project dollars, as brought forth by KEDCO Director of Projects and Operations Dawn Wilkinson.
“Every year the commissioners are gracious enough to set aside a budget for special project requests for KEDCO as the year goes on,” she said. “We’ve decided to submit a request for $180,000 of those dollars for the first two quarters of the year to be used throughout the year on different initiatives.”
Of the funds requested, $50,000 will go toward housing initiatives; $35,000 toward Made Here 2026; $50,000 toward business attraction and retention; $10,000 toward marketing and communication; $25,000 toward strategic memberships; and $10,000 toward All IN Kosciusko collaboration.
A balance of $70,000 remains in the special projects fund.
Wilkinson said at the end of the year, KEDCO will return to give a breakdown of how the dollars were spent and what the return on investment is.
• An ordinance amending the size of plats to be recorded, as presented by County Recorder Deb Wright. She said it was basically a bit of housekeeping.
“So in 2020, we had an ordinance approved restricting the size of subdivision plats that we could accept because we were running out of storage space. We had the plat cabinets at that time ... so they just took up a lot of space in the drawers,” she said.
Her office eventually got a different form of storage, but forgot about the ordinance that was approved in 2020. The new ordinance allows for the acceptance of the bigger plats as storage is no longer an issue.
• A contract with Two Men and a Truck for the moving of voting machines in May and November, as requested by County Clerk Melissa Boggs. Two Men and a Truck will deliver the voting machines the day prior to election day to all the vote centers, and then pick them up on the Wednesday after election day and return them to the clerk’s office. The contract is for the May primary and the November general elections.
