Month: July 2022

The Polk County Board of Commissioners met inside the Polk County Government Center on Tuesday morning, where they heard from County Administrator Chuck Whiting, who came forward to discuss their budget for 2023, among other items.

County Administrator Chuck Whiting first came forward to discuss the State Auditing Service with the board. He explained that they had to make a decision by their meeting on Tuesday, July 26, if they would be moving on from the current State Auditor that they had, as they would have to let them know now if they would so they could plan their work accordingly. Currently, the State Auditor is discussing the 2021 audit and will conduct this year’s audit next. So, they needed to discuss the next cycle for 2023 and 2024. Which meant if the board chose to move on from the State Auditor, there would be two audits for the new auditor to conduct, which he didn’t want to bring in to train new people to take. Whiting admitted that it would be easier to stay with who they currently have but would like to see them improve, and nothing wrong with the State Auditors, but that they may not give what the staff wants them to fund. “They had some discussion two weeks ago. Then today, we talked about it some more. I didn’t have any real alternative, so they chose to stay with it,” Whiting explained. “Four years ago, they chose to move from the State Auditor, and two years ago, we were in that pandemic, so we stayed, so we’ll stay again, which that means that in addition to the 2021 and 2022 audits, we’ll also have 2023 and 2024 audits done by the State Auditor, and they do a good job. We don’t ever know what it’s going to actually cost us, but there’s no arguing with them once it’s done.” Commissioner Willhite also recommended that they stay with the State Auditor for now, but when they next have to change, they will learn some better ways to use their funds. After much discussion, the board agreed to stay with the State Auditor and approved the motion unanimously.

Whiting then requested the board to give him the authority to sign expense claim vouchers for payment granted to Department Heads Wade Farrell for a Land Fill Fund, Todd Rue, and Wade Burrack for a Resource Recovery Fund expense vouchers of their respective approved departmental budgets by County Policy. Whiting then requested the board to approve the posting and advertising of the now vacant Facilities Director Position (and potentially Assistant Director) with some new changes that he wanted to have reviewed and recommended to the business management side of the position. These changes included distinguishing “office” buildings as the primary focus of the position, classifying the position now as a Grade 19 rather than 17. “Every time we have a vacancy, we look at the job description and see if there’s something that we should address. I looked at it and brought a little bit more into the description from a business management standpoint,” Whiting explained. “I think we learned from our prior director with the number of things he was working on that those brought value to the county, and we would like to see that continue and progress. So, we did add that it changes the grade by two, so we’ll see what the market will give us for applicants.” Whiting reported that they have received one application already for the position and are currently engaged in hiring that individual. After much discussion, the board both motions unanimously.

The board closed the meeting by beginning the discussions on the 2023 Budget. Whiting began by first referring to their budget from 2022 and that there were many things that would impact the budget. “We picked up from where we left off when we got the 2022 budget approved, and it’s amazing how many things have changed since then in terms of inflation, gas prices, and even the marketplace for employees. We’re getting a lot of pressure in these three areas,” Whiting explained. “We wanted to go over what might be coming, what those things may mean, and what kind of pressures that may put on the budget and the levee and so forth.” Whiting explained that the county’s department heads had received their input sheets, and they have until Friday, July 22, to work on them before they return them to him. He can get an initial counting of them and what revenues they have with the Finance Director. Then by the end of August, he would have a proposal for the board. Then in September, they will invite each department head to meet with the board to discuss them individually. He mentioned that last year, their biggest expenditures for 2022 were for Social Services at $18,776,457 and that generally, they have been flat overall in tax rates over the past few years. Overall, he reported that they are looking okay, day-to-day though will be more accurate when they have more information in the future on the levees.

The next meeting will take place on Tuesday, July 19, at 9:30 a.m. in the Polk County Government Center.

The post POLK COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS CHOOSE TO STAY WITH STATE AUDITORS UNTIL 2024 appeared first on KROX.

The Grand Forks Road Crews announced that Belmont Road, which had been closed during the day but reopened during the evenings and weekends, will be closed to all through traffic starting Friday, July 8, 2022, from 47th Ave. S. to Rivers Edge Drive. as crews begin excavating the road.

This portion of Belmont Road will be closed to through traffic until mid-September, weather permitting.

The post BELMONT ROAD WILL BE CLOSED TO ALL THROUGH TRAFFIC ON FRIDAY UNTIL MID-SEPTEMBER appeared first on KROX.

The Community Pool in Crookston was closed yesterday morning due to chemical imbalances because of the number of people in the pool. With the number of people that used the pool recently, the chemicals were at a low level that the pool had to be closed for safety reasons.

The Crookston Parks & Recreation Department reported that this is a normal occurrence and that the pool has been fully reopened and operational since 2:00 p.m. yesterday and is open to the public once again.

The post CROOKSTON COMMUNITY POOL REOPENS AFTER BEING CLOSED FOR CHECMICAL IMBALANCES appeared first on KROX.

The Golden Link Senior Center’s Experienced Americans for July 2022 are Frank and Jeanie Lindgren. The couple has been married for 53 years and has lived in Polk County for nearly all of their lives.

Jeanie grew up on a farm about 15 miles away from Crookston with an older sister, where they both assisted in cattle and green farming. “We helped out wherever we could, I had an older sister that helped out in the fields, and I was designated to be the cook, so I helped in the house whenever I could,” said Jeanie. She began school first in a country school up to first grade before moving to the Crookston School District in second grade. After high school, she worked various jobs working at a jewelry store and a bank in East Grand Forks. Frank, in the meantime, was born on a farm just north of East Grand Forks but says that he’s a kid that moved over 40 times before he became 20 years old since they lived in East Grand Forks during the wintertime but moved back to the farm in the summer. “I went to school at Sacred Heart High School in East Grand Forks, and from there, I went to college at St. John’s University, graduated in 1968, went through the ROTC program, and went into the Army for two years,” Frank said. After serving two years, Frank spent ten months at the Dugway Proving Grounds Army facility, where he would soon get married to Jeanie before having to be deployed for a year in Thailand.

But Jeanie and Frank were actually closer than they initially thought before they met and got married as Frank’s oldest brother and Jeanie’s aunt were a married couple that lived together in California, and every two or three years, they would come back to Minnesota to celebrate anniversaries, and on the reunion for their 15th anniversary, Frank and Jeanie met each other for the first time at the anniversary party. Frank was working in St. Cloud but decided to quit his job and returned home as he was about to go back into the service soon. When he did, he and Jeanie began dating as he began being moved to different army bases around the country, first to Fort Eustis in Virginia, then to Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah. Before being deployed to Thailand, the two got married in Dugway Proving Grounds before going back to Minnesota to officially be married there before Frank would be deployed to Thailand until the Fall of 1970.

Since then, both have been working in many ways to help their family and community grow in many different ways. While Frank was serving in Thailand, Jeanie moved in with her parents and continued working at Mountz Jewelers for about a year and part-time at a bank until their first son was born in 1972. They are the parents of four children and the grandparents of twelve grandchildren. “Our oldest child was born in September of ’72 and is an ER doctor in Fergus Falls. Then we have a son in the Twin Cities who is a pharmacist at Walgreens. We have a daughter who teaches in the School District in Crookston, and we have a son who was born in ’82 and is out in Arizona as a pharmacist and also has a law degree that works for a company where he’s the mediacy that approves or disapproves high-end drugs for a company,” Jeanie explained. After having their first child, Jeanie had to decide whether or not she would return to work and decided to work in daycare after a suggestion from a fellow worker at the bank, where she worked until she retired in May.

After Frank got out of the service, he went to work with Eickhof Construction, where he built bridges and commercial buildings in Minnesota and North and South Dakota and took part in many bid lettings and would travel to many different areas to put in his bids such as Brookings, South Dakota to bid on the Student Union building in South Dakota State University, and Washington D.C. to bid with the United States Department of Agriculture and other government work since he was in the Army. In 1982, Frank then got into the insurance business for nine years before becoming the service manager of Associated Plumbing and Heating for about five years. Frank also stepped into the banking business by joining a bank agency in Ada and Winger for a few years. After that, Frank chose to work closer to home and became a custodian for the Crookston High School and Washington Elementary School, and even became a grounds person, maintaining the lawns and removing snow for the schools until retiring in 2014. And during all of that, he was a member of the Crookston City Council for multiple years, first from 1996 to 2003 and then from 2006 to 2014, when he officially retired. But, retiring from the school didn’t put him out of work as Frank has since been a bus driver for the school, transporting kids in the mornings and afternoons and to sporting events like football and baseball. He also works as a custodian putting in a couple of hours at the Crookston Cathedral for Immaculate Conception, as well as the president of the Lion’s Club in Crookston in 1985 and Ada in 1990. Other organizations Frank is a part of are the Crookston Eagles Club, the Crookston American Legion, the Crookston VFW, and the DAV.

In their later years, the couple has been trying to take as much part in their family as possible, mainly in the lives of their twelve grandchildren. “We’ve tried to keep up with going to our grandkid’s activities. We’ve tried to go as many of those as we can,” Jeanie said. “Whether it’s just to drive down to the Cities to watch a soccer game for our grandsons and come back the same day, or to go to Alexandria to watch them run in different meets. Whatever it takes, we tried to do as much as we can.” They report that they have six grandsons and six granddaughters, with the oldest just graduating from college and their youngest being only seven years old, and they are very proud of all of their children’s accomplishments.

Both are honored to have been selected but are also a bit surprised to be chosen as they feel there are many deserving people that deserve the award as much as they do. “I’m very honored to have been selected, I told someone that I’m not very experienced, so I don’t know how I became an Experienced American, but it’s quite an honor, and I think there’s a lot of deserving people for this award and it blows me away that we were selected,” Frank said. Both thank the people who had a part in selecting them and say it’s very humbling to receive this award.

A reception will be held for Frank and Jeanie at the Golden Links Senior Center on Friday, July 8, from 1:30 to 3:00 p.m.

The post FRANK AND JEANIE LINDGREN CHOSEN TO RECEIVE GOLDEN LINK’S EXPERIENCED AMERICANS AWARD appeared first on KROX.

The Crookston School Board met on Thursday morning for a special meeting in the Crookston High School in Room D108 to discuss and decide on the options for the Middle School Building Project. Board member Tim Dufault joined the forum via phone call due to testing positive for COVID, but member Patty Dillabough was absent from the meeting.

After the Call to Order, school board chairperson Frank Fee opened the discussion on the Middle School Building Project. Superintendent Dave Kuehn reminded the board of some of the ideas the school board came forward with at their last meeting on Monday, June 27. He explained that the board initially leaned towards upgrading school facilities and maintenance and had two options. “The District has $4 million in Federal Funds that they have put in a balance they wanted to use for facilities. So, they wrote a plan through the Department of Education, and it was approved that they could use those $4 million to add six preschool classrooms at Highland as well as do some remodeling at the High School to accommodate moving preschool and kindergarten into Highland and moving the sixth-grade class to the High School,” Superintendent Kuehn explained. “That was part of a plan that I think has been discussed in the district for the past year.” Kuehn reported that their bids were from Bradbury Stamm Construction from St. Cloud for $4,490,000, which had risen from its original $3.4 million bid. The board noted they would have to find some way to fill in the additional million dollars as the bid expires next week, either by using the LTFM funds or another pool of funds the school had. The second option was to use the money for upgrades to the different facilities and capital items in the School District that would need to do over the next three to five years in maintenance projects. Superintendent Kuehn reported that both options were needed in the district, neither option was a bad option to go forward with, but that the administration team was leaning closer to the first option. Board Member Dave Davidson suggested that they could pool money from multiple different pools that the school had rather than taking all of it from one single pool.

Washington Elementary School Principal Denice Oliver believed that the additions to Highland would be helpful to the school, saying that Washington already feels the close space with the many preschoolers and kindergarteners coming to the school and potentially has 90 kids coming in for the 2022-23 school year. Highland Principal Chris Trostad also mentioned that if preschool students joined Highland if they went through with Option 1, they would have to make changes to the playground to be more friendly to preschool students, but other members were concerned if Highland had the room to welcome the new students as they noted during the COVID pandemic that space was very tight, and with the rising prices of inflation, it may cost even more than what is planned now. High School Principal Matt Torgerson came forward saying that he believed that the High School could create a separate school feeling for the middle school students with the addition while still being united with the high school students in some aspects, such as gym, band room, and industrial tech classes, and that now was the best time to fund those additions. “We have a lot of good things happening at the High School, but one area that I see we need to work on is transitioning those sixth-graders to seventh grade a bit better,” Principal Torgerson explained. “We do have some things planned out. We plan to meet with the junior high teachers to figure things out this coming year. I think doing a true Middle School would give us the opportunity to divide the students a little bit so that we could have the sixth, seventh, and eighth grade a little more self-contained from the ninth through twelfth graders.” Board member Davidson asked how the $4 million would help the High School and Middle School students, which Principal Torgerson explained that the school would build a wall down the school and add some new classrooms and facilities, and split some of the staff that teach all of the grade levels down to teach for one of the individual schools or bring up some of the teachers from Highland, which could help some of their intervention programs for the Middle School students on the transition to High School and free up their schedules and make them more flexible.

Principal Trostad also voiced his support of the first option saying that the upgraded facilities could be a thing that would make kids want to come to Crookston and schools here, and they wouldn’t be going to the taxpayers to cover the costs. Board member Davidson then asked that if they chose to go with the additions to Highland and the High School remodel, how it would affect the referendum with the multi-sports facility in the High School as people would wonder why none of the funds would go to paying for that rather than having to reach out to the community. Superintendent Kuehn explained that the Federal funds they received would not be allowed to be used for a multi-use sports complex and had to go towards student needs and making up for learning students lost during the pandemic. “The dollars that we get from the Federal Government have to be used for needs for students, learning loss, and educational activities, and they would not have approved it for a football-track complex,” Kuehn explained. “That’s a separate project that needed to become a referendum and look for support from the community whereas these Federal dollars, there is some flexibility in the spending, but if we would’ve asked if we can use these $4 million to build a football-track, they would’ve said no.” Principal Torgerson asked if the board had a timeline of when the projects would be completed if they went forward with it. The board responded that the estimate for completion was by January 2024, which is when the funds would expire in anyway, so the students would make the exchange to the new schools in the 2024-25 school year.

The board then motioned to approve the bid from Bradbury Stamm Construction to do the Highland addition and High School remodel, which they approved unanimously. The next regular School Board meeting will take place on Monday, July 25, at 5:00 p.m. in the Crookston High School Choir/Orchestra Room.

The post CROOKSTON SCHOOL BOARD APPROVES HIGHLAND ADDITIONS AND HIGH SCHOOL REMODEL appeared first on KROX.

Olivia Huck is the 2022 Crookston Firefighters Association Memorial Scholarship recipient.

The scholarship is to honor all past members of the Crookston Firefighters Association(CFA) that are no longer with us today. This scholarship was made possible by an endowment sponsored by the Association’s charitable gaming.

The CFA uses charitable gaming to fund our life-saving equipment and trucks. A portion of those proceeds are also given to local community kids’ activities and non-profit programs.  Crookston Firefighters Association has charitable gaming at the One N Only Bar and Grill, Crookston Inn Scobey’s Pub and Grub, Snow Sled Inn Bar and Grill, and Minakwa golf course.

Olivia is a 2022 graduate of Crookston High School.  She will be attending Minnesota State University Moorhead (MSUM) in the fall majoring in health care.  Ms. Hucks’s outstanding academic record and especially her community service work made her a great selection for this year’s award.

The CFA Memorial Scholarship is for a graduating high school senior residing in the city of Crookston or one of the townships served by the Crookston Firefighters Association. The townships we serve are Crookston, Roome, Eldred, Euclid, Belgium, Fanny, Parnell, Lowell, Andover, Fairfax, Gentilly, Kertsonville, Hammond, and Russia. Applicants must plan to attend a two (2)-year community college or four (4)-year college or university.

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