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Colorado County Commissioners decided to officially file a lawsuit at their commissioners’ court meeting Monday morning, March 24, against any company that “delivered or hauled waste” in tandem with David Polston and Inland Recycling involving the contamination of Skull Creek.
In addition to the civil suit against David Polston and Kenneth Owens directly, which is set to go to trial on April 7, county commissioners are looking to get all responsible parties held accountable with the decision to pursue litigation against any additional responsible parties that may have worked with Inland Recycling.
The upcoming court case has seen the state already enter a judgement against Polston and his companies, assessing civil penalties of $46.5 million dollars.
Commissioners additionally approved a sole bid of $591,757 for a Texas General Land Office Community Development and Revitalization Contract for water improvement that would see a water system component and included water lines.
The lone bid, awarded to Beyond Site Services, was accepted after recommendation from James Weishuhn of Weishuhn Engineering, who vouched for the company having worked with them in the past. Weishuhn says he was suprised there was only one bid and that the GLO were a bit concerned, but ultimately viewed it as a “non-competitive procurement,” given that the advertising for the bid was done accordingly.
“We’ve worked with those guys in the past and they do good work,” said Weishuhn. “We were on the bubble to go out and try to rebid this project again, but we did demonstrate to the GLO that we had advertised in four different methods and made it available to the public.”
The GLO grant that was awarded to allocate for this project, in the amount of $606k, saw the proposed bid come in below the maximum amount of funds provided for the task, leaving around $15k “on the table.”
Funds were additionally approved by commissioners to be reallocated from the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Colorado County secretary salary and benefits to the Colorado County Sheriff’s Office budget salary line item to aid in the department hiring on a new position.
CCSO Chief Deputy Kevin Daniel says that the county agreed to provide the salary and benefits to the DPS county secretary long ago, back when there were more DPS officers present in the county when technology wasn’t as effective. He says now with improved technology, CCSO personnel take on that workload themselves, leaving the previous DPS position unneeded.
“There was a higher workload,” said Daniel. “Technology was not as good as it is now, and a secretary was needed for that position. From the conversations that I’ve had, I think that the salary that goes to that position would be much better suited back in the county, since it is on the law enforcement side. I’d like to see it go back to the sheriff’s office. I know that the sheriff has got a need for another investigator as well as a deputy.”
The needed positions, according to Colorado County Sheriff Justin Lindemann, could potentially see an investigative administrator come in and take on sexual assault cases, active homicides and go through all the older cases prior to 2011 to add them into the new system. He says the DPS position isn’t needed at the CCSO anymore given the fact that the deputies now take on the responsibilities filled by that secretary, whose position was vacated in January and still unoccupied, echoing Daniel’s sentiment.
“When I started in 2009 here at the sheriff’s office, we the deputies did not work accidents. We didn’t touch accidents. We did traffic control for accidents. But at that point in time, DPS did them. The agreement, from my understanding from Sergeant Chandler, who actually told me he helped create that position, was due to five, six troopers being in the county at the time, handwriting citations, bringing in a million dollars in revenue at the time, something along that line there. We’re talking about handwritten tickets. We’re talking about things that have to be entered. But now, with the computers and the technologies they have, they automatically download into our JPS computer system.”
The next Colorado County Commissioners court meeting will be held on Monday, April 14.
