By Charlene Sims, info@linncountyjournal.com
MOUND CITY – County Clerk David Lamb presented resolutions for policies in 2025 to the Linn County Commissioners on Monday, Dec. 23. Most of the resolutions were routine but Lamb provided more than one option for two of the resolutions.
Lamb told the commissioners that for the holiday resolution he had several prepared. One was for the regular calendar year, one added Juneteenth to the holidays, one added Juneteenth and the day after Christmas since Christmas is on a Thursday in 2025, and one just added the day after Christmas.
Lamb said that in a survey by the Kansas Clerks Association of the 105 counties in Kansas 24 counties counted Juneteenth as a holiday, representatives from 48 counties said they did not and the rest did not respond.
Juneteenth, officially called Juneteenth National Independence Day, is a federal holiday in the United States. It is celebrated annually on June 19 to commemorate the ending of slavery in the United State. It celebrates the date in 1865 when 225,000 slaves in Texas were declared free by the United States Army.
Federal offices, the U.S. Postal Service, and most large banks observe it as an official holiday. State offices also are closed on that day.
“Personally, I would be in favor of doing the Juneteenth, because I just think it is sending the wrong message not to, to potential employees, our communities and things of that nature,” Commissioner Jason Hightower said.
“Well, I think as far as the Juneteenth, I am not in favor of it myself,” said Commissioner Jim Johnson. “There’s other counties around that don’t. We give more holiday than other counties around here.”
“I agree,” said Commission Chair Danny McCullough.
All of the commissioners said they would prefer to wait on deciding about the Friday after Christmas in 2025.
The next resolution for 2025 that Lamb offered options to was the official newspaper. He said that he had made up one option for the Linn County News to be the official newspaper. The other option was like last year’s resolution to make the Linn County News the official newspaper and the Linn County Journal an additional official publication for the county for 2024.
Lamb told the commissioners, “That at some point through the year you decided to not do that with the journal anymore. I’ve got that resolution prepared to say just Linn County News or one like last year where it was an additional publication.”
McCullough said that he just wanted to do the Linn County News as the official newspaper.
“We just have to have a printed paper, right, one printed paper?” asked Johnson.
“We are required to have an official paper. I’m good with just leaving it,” said Johnson.
At the Aug. 12, 2024 meeting, Commissioners Johnson and McCullough voted to strip the Linn County Journal of its status as a legal publication for the county. Hightower voted against the motion.
Changing the Journal’s status came after the publication filed a complaint with the Kansas Attorney General’s office that McCullough had not complied with the Kansas Open Records Act (KORA) request for cell phone records of the commissioners’ county and private phones.
McCullough also complained that an opinion piece in the Journal that was critical about the McCullough’s and Johnson’s failure to act to replace the Hell’s Bend bridge, calling it an act of negligence. He said that article affected him and his family.
The commission went on to approve replacement of the bridge on Oct. 21, 2024, after state Sen. Caryn Tyson (R-Parker) brokered a deal to get the state pay an $259,000 for the project and capped the county’s outlay at about $180,000.
The state attorney general’s office is still investigating the KORA complaint as well as a subsequent Kansas Open Meetings Act (KOMA) by the Journal that both McCullough and Johnson had been in contact via text messaging outside of public commission meetings, a violation of state statute.
At the Dec. 23 meeting ,Commissioner-elect Alison Hamilton came up to the podium and told the commissioners that she had learned at a conference she had just attended that the county’s official publication could be the county website.
“So when you are considering publication and you want to allocate funding to go to CivicPlus and updating the website and things like that you could very well dismantle the publication in the newspaper and focus on the website,” said Hamilton.
Lamb said, “You might be able to do that on some things, but there are statutes in place right now that require publication in a newspaper that have not been repealed.”
Hamilton asked that Lamb have information available for her at next week’s meeting about what the county spent on publishing notices in the Linn County News and the Linn County Journal.
Lamb said he would get that for her.
“There are specific statutes that require, like my elections, I have to publish on a website and in the paper. (Linn County Treasurer Janet Kleweno) has to do the tax roll in the paper, and there’s been nothing at the state level that has changed that at this point,” said Lamb.
Hamilton said that she attended an entire session on it and she will look into it more.
“We can approve the resolution then we can dissolve it later,” said McCullough.
“We can make it our official newspaper and we can look into it later. I am good with that,” said Johnson.
The commissioners approved:
• The Linn County News as the official newspaper,
• The pay dates for the county,
• The official banks for the county. Treasurer Kleweno asked that they stay the same.
• The Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) waiver. This states that the county does not use GAAP, which is a common practice among counties. The county uses cash basis accounting.
• Keeping the same holidays as 2024 by not adding Juneteenth or the Friday after Christmas.
Lamb said he would be bringing the resolutions for the salary schedule and cancelling warrants (checks that haven’t come in) for a vote a next week’s meeting.
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