County hires temporary staff for elections
The county commissioners on Wednesday, April 12, approved a contract with a Butler staffing and recruitment business for 10 workers to open mail-in ballots on the days of the primary and general elections.
The contract with Specialized Staffing and Industry Recruiters calls for the county to pay the workers $18.96 per hour.
Temporary workers have been hired to assist Election Bureau staff on election days since 2019, said deputy county clerk Maria Malloy.
She said the workers will start at 7 a.m. and continue until all the mail-in ballots have been counted.
The workers will open the ballot envelopes and hand them to registrars who will run the ballots through scanners that count the votes, she said.
In unrelated business, Fred Caesar, the volunteer curator of the Saxonburg Museum, asked the commissioners to consider allocating 20% of revenue from the county’s hotel tax to organizations that work to preserve the history of the county.
The tax, which is assessed on room rentals at hotels, was set at 3% when it was established in 2002, but was increased to 5% in 2016. The tax was created to fund county-wide tourism, convention promotion and tourism development.
Caesar said, organizations that want to obtain a grant from the tax revenue must be due-paying members of the Butler County Tourism and Convention Bureau. Members can apply for grants up to $5,000 that the organizations must match, he said.
He asked the commissioners to consider allocated 80% of the tax revenue to the bureau and 20% to historical organizations.
The Saxonburg Museum relies on donations and funding from Saxonburg to operate the museum, Caesar said. Currently, the museum is conducting a fundraiser to repair the historic workshop in Roebling Park, he said.
In other business, the commissioner awarded a $129,969 contract to renovate the restrooms at Laura Doerr Park in Jefferson Township. The contract was awarded to Graham Construction of Claysville, Washington County, which submitted the lower of two bids for the project. The other bid was $185,000.
The commissioners approved reallocating $41,328 from the township’s 2020 and 2021 Community Development Block Grants to the park project.
