The Webster County Board of Supervisors signed an emergency watershed protection grant Tuesday morning that will allow for repairs to be made on McGuire Bend Road in Lehigh. According to Webster County Engineer Jamie Johll, the grant will provide $425,000 for streambank stabilization and debris removal on the rural river road.

The supervisors also approved a traffic safety grant application of approximately $42,000 to purchase a changeable message sign from the Department of Transportation.

A maintenance upgrade, not to exceed $20,000, for the elevator at the Department of Human Services building, 330 First Ave. N., which is county-owned, was approved by the Board.

“We’ve been having some issues with the elevator over at the DHS building,” said Supervisor Bob Thode. “The guts need to be replaced. I’m trying to get the best bang for our buck. If we’re actually going to go forward with this or have to fully replace it, we need to move forward.”

Thode said he has lined up multiple companies to take a look at the elevator and hopes to receive the lowest bid shortly. Thode noted that the county is currently ADA compliant as the elevator was working Tuesday morning, but noted that with the problems they’ve had with the elevator, he’s not sure how long it will remain operational.

The supervisors also approved of the chair signing a quote of $126,422.60 for replacement Virtualization Environment for the county’s data center. According to Webster County MIS/GIS Director Andrew McGill, the current servers were purchased in 2017 and along with the county’s main storage server, are at the end of their lifetimes.

“Knowing this, we sent out requests for quotes from three different vendors,” said McGill. “We gave them the criteria that we wanted, the storage we needed, the CPUs, the amount of RAM we wanted per host, and we received back three different quotes.”

The supervisors approved the proposal from SHI International Corp of Somerset, New Jersey.

“We looked at the different systems that we had, looked at demos, at what would change for our environment, and we’re happy with what we’re presenting today,” said McGill.

According to McGill, the cost is a one-time purchase payment. After three years, the county will have the opportunity to pay maintenance costs until it needs to make a future purchase.

The chair was also authorized to sign an Iowa Crossroads of Global Innovation Site Certification documentation supplemental agreement request with Snyder & Associates, of Ankeny, for $41,200.

“It is entirely related to development being developed,” said Wade Greiman from Snyder & Associates of the contract amendment. “Things change over time. We had completed 95 percent of the work from our prior base agreement from a couple years ago. Changes with the state legislature, changes with prospective developments have required the changing of the footprint for the site certification.”

According to Greiman, Snyder & Associates already started the work in good faith knowing that the deadline for the project is Aug. 29.