The Hardin County Fiscal Court heard updates from department heads during their second meeting of the month Tuesday.
Hardin County EMS Director Mark Peterson reported on January and February activity, with 1,623 calls responded to in January. Peterson said data may change for county EMS as Baptist Health Hardin’s EMS service went live for transfers in February.
“We were kind of curious to see how that’s going to impact us,” Peterson said. “We don’t have a great picture of it, but you can see right away that our responses went down significantly in February. We made 1,213 responses in February, and only 32 of those were transfers.”
Peterson said county EMS made more than $1,004,000 in collections in February.
“As far as I know, that’s our best month in revenue ever, and there’s a lot of things to that,” Peterson said. “We had some increases to our monthly allotments for the House Bill 8 money. We had about a $34,000 increase in that money that comes into us every month, and we’ve also been working very diligently with Judge Taul on some process improvements as far as our patient care reporting and stuff like that.”
In other meeting news, Hardin County E-911 Director Mike Leo said county 911 answered 4,116 calls in February.
Hardin County Jailer Josh Lindblom said the Hardin County Detention Center took in 510 inmates in February and released 506, with the average total population for the month 580. Inmates worked 10,735 hours, including filling 2,280 bags of trash.
Hardin County Judge-Executive Keith Taul said county government is preparing for the next fiscal year.
“We are in the middle of a budget process for the next fiscal year, as painful as it is, but we will plan to present the budget at the next meeting in April, and that will be our first reading of that budget, so that’s our plan right now,” Taul said.
The Hardin County Fiscal Court will next meet April 9, and the next Town Hall Forum will be held in the fiscal courtroom at 5:30 p.m. on April 30.
