In the weekly COVID update during the Wright County Supervisors meeting on Monday, Sandy McGrath noted that the county has just surpassed 1,500 positive cases. She expects the numbers to trend upward after the holidays since some labs were closed or doing minimal work in the last week. McGrath said that public health has been distributing the Moderna vaccine to healthcare workers and first responders throughout the county and at the hospitals. As of Monday, she said they still had about 50 doses from the first batch of vaccines to give and added that the county has been allotted 200 more doses. McGrath said Public Health has been receiving calls and questions about when high risk individuals will be able to receive the vaccine. For now, they are taking down names and phone numbers for those people and will notify the public via newspaper, social media, etc. when the vaccine becomes more widely available in the county.
Tricia Rosendahl, Wright County Fair Manager, and others on the fair board were present to give their annual update and request continued funding. Rosendahl said although the fair was very different and scaled back due to COVID, they accomplished a lot for the youth. Many events were still held though precautions had to be taken. There was lots of live-streaming and moving things to online portals. Rosendahl also went through other current and future projects they would like to accomplish at the fairgrounds, including electric work.
Ultimately, the fair board asked the supervisors to continue their support for the fair at its current level of $26,500. The county will again offer the fair $5,000 in matching funds for any grants that they would receive for capital improvement projects. A full fair is scheduled for 2021 to run July 7th-July 12th with the theme of “County Pride – County Wide,” which was the same theme as they had planned to use for 2020.
The board passed the third reading of Ordinance #61 after waiving the second reading. This ordinance pertained to setting up the waterworks enterprise at the Agribusiness Park. It included language setting up water rates, billing, service disconnections and more for water customers. (The ordinance can be read in full in last week’s paper).
A conference call with Franklin County was held regarding a change order to repairs on joint drainage district #118. Most of this district is located within Franklin County. In the course of the repairs, more collapsed drainage tile was discovered that needs to be fixed. An increase of $10,590 to the project was passed.
