Dave Bohrer / The Meridian StarThe Raymond P. Davis County Annex houses several Lauderdale County offices.

Lauderdale County employees will return to physical timecards following difficulties signing in remotely to their computer system.

Supervisors voted to discontinue Harris Computer Timeclock Plus and return to paper documentation Monday since employees with the Road Department couldn’t effectively use the system.

“We were having a lot of trouble with the Road Department because of a lack of service. Some guys told us they would drive 30 minutes to another satellite location just to get signed in,” Jonathan Wells, the board president, said. 

Accounting clerks said it would be simpler to have one system, rather than a separate system for the Road Department. The change comes just as the City of Meridian received a severe deficiency in their audit for having a paper system, with auditors saying it could potentially be abused.

“(A computer timeclock) is the right thing to do (but) it wasn’t working,” Wells said. “We decided for now to step back.”

The county will also establish a separate email account for records requests, which were typically handled by Chris Lafferty, the county administrator. 

“You can bring (records requests) in physically or email them to (records@lauderdalecounty.org). As of late, we’ve been inundated with requests and it was interrupting my daily routine,” Lafferty said. 

Lafferty said he and the supervisors’ administrative assistant would receive emails to the address. 

“At the suggestion of the ethics commission, we opened up this email address,” Lafferty said. 

Paper copies of county records will cost $0.15 per page and DVDs of supervisor meetings, previously $25, will go down as the cost of producing the DVDs has decreased, according to Lafferty on Monday. Supervisors upheld those changes.

Supervisors also approved the emergency purchase of an HVAC unit for the E911 building for $75,000. 

“One of the HVACs in the building went out and it’s the one that serves E911,” Lafferty said Monday. “Typically, this is not an emergency purchase because we have the ability to move people to other offices… but we called the state auditor’s office and they agreed that this was an emergency purchase because of the sensitive equipment that couldn’t be moved.”

Lafferty’s agenda on Monday included 10 fund transfers, with eight related to the disbursement of grant funds.

“In government, we work off of a zero-budget principle,” Lafferty said. “The reason for a lot of the end of year transfers is grants… with most grants, you have to have an account dedicated specifically for that grant and when you expend those funds, you no longer need the account.”

Others, Lafferty said, were reimbursements from grants for county expenditures, such as the DUI Grant and Occupant Protection Grant. 

“We advance the money form the general fund pending reimbursement,” Lafferty said. 

The board will begin discussing the budget for the next fiscal year, starting this fall, in July.