[Editor’s Note: This article is the third of a series of articles on the Grant County Commission work session on June 6, 2023 and the regular meeting on June 8, 2023. This one completes county director reports at the work session.]

By Mary Alice Murphy

The next county director reports at the Grant County Commission work session on June 6, 2023 came from Road Superintendent Joe Grijalva.

“Our blademen are doing routine maintenance now that we just finished patching,” Grijalva said. “Now that Southwest Concrete and Paving got the chips, we will begin our chip sealing operations. We are currently hauling chips for projects. We are working with the town of Silver City to help us with putting up the warning lights on Airport Road and the Tyrone townsite. We didn’t want to accidentally get into the fiber optics on Airport Road. I talked to Robert Esqueda and he has helped us avoid the fiber optic. We need to finish Little Walnut chip seal in late June, and another ship sealing in July and in Silver City in August.”

District 3 Commissioner Alicia Edwards asked about lights in Arenas Valley.

Grijalva said he went to the state engineers, and it has fallen by the wayside. “It is more of a state easement issue. I’ll reach out again.”

District 5 Commissioner Harry Browne asked about warning lights at the airport.

“They are to warn of cattle on the road,” Grijalva said. “Drivers have killed several cattle and we don’t want anyone to get hurt. The lights on Mangas Road have helped.”

The next report came from IT Director Adam Baca. “We are finalizing the network link to the Detention Center and probably tomorrow we will have a brief outage for fine tuning. We have implemented the managed network link to the Road Department and have replaced some of the equipment. We have replaced about 50 percent of the equipment at the Detention Center with new equipment. We are continuing to stage the service infrastructure to migrate from the old system to the new system. We will do the same at the Road Department. We are also preparing for the GovPros payment system in the Treasurer’s Office. We need that as secure as possible. It will offer better payment possibilities.”

The emergency manager report was in the commissioners’ packets, but Justin Gojkovich was away from the office. The report included that project work sheets for damaged and repaired county roads are being processed. Repeaters for communications are getting attention. The emergency management planning grant application has been turned in. And Gojkovich is also working on the Grant County Resilience Plan. Future projects include a hazard mitigation plan, train the trainer training, Code Red renewal for the county, and continuing weekly calls with the state Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management for fires and flooding. 

The next article will cover the public input at the regular meeting.

To visit the previous articles, go to https://www.grantcountybeat.com/news/news-articles/78763-grant-county-commission-held-work-session-060623-part-1; and https://www.grantcountybeat.com/news/news-articles/78798-grant-county-commission-held-work-session-060623-part-2