From left: Elizabeth Sensenstein, Phil Parker, Kyle Gibbons, Jeff Cockerill, Geoff McKim, Peter Iversen.
Monroe County chief deputy sheriff Phil Parker.
From left: Monroe County chief deputy sheriff Phil Parker, Kyle Gibbons, and county attorney Jeff Cockrill.
Now finally settled is the wording of the job description for a new position at Monroe County’s jail, which is supposed to help put the jail into a clean and sanitary condition and keep it that way.
The job description was the topic of a Friday noon meeting of the county council’s personnel administration committee (PAC), which agreed to forward the job description to Waggoner, Irwin, and Sheele, Inc. (WIS)—which is the county’s HR consultant.
WIS will incorporate the job description into the county’s job classification scheme, which determines compensation. The final step in the process will be for the full county council to approve the creation of the position, and its compensation.
“Try as I may, I cannot come to grips why this low-level position, a sheriff’s office employee, is of any interest at all for the commissioners, other than to fully support it.”
That’s one sentence of a 3,500-word email that Monroe County sheriff Ruben Marté addressed on Monday night to Penny Githens, president of the board of county commissioners.
The other two commissioners are Lee Jones and Julie Thomas. The email was sent to county commissioners and other members of the community justice response committee (CJRC), among others.
When The B Square asked Githens about Marté’s email at a Tuesday noon meeting of the Monroe County Democrats’ Club, she said she had not yet read through it.
The new low-level position will have the job title of “jail technician”—a member of the staff who would be responsible for cleaning and sanitizing the jail. The jail technician would also supervise inmates who work to clean the jail.
One example: “The smell and taste of the water has been absolutely disgusting for at least three weeks. Has the cause been found yet? It makes me nauseated to run the tap in my home.”
At Monday’s meeting of the utilities service board (USB), city of Bloomington utilities (CBU) director Vic Kelson told members the taste and odor issue had essentially been solved. But it will take a while for the good tasting water to work its way through the distribution system, Kelson added.
The cause of the dirt or fish taste, according to Kelson, is naturally occurring chemicals that are produced by algal blooms in Lake Monroe—geosmin and methyl-isoborneol (MIB).
Kelson said the long hot spell with no rain towards the end of the summer had led to a large algal bloom in Lake Monroe, the source of Bloomington’s drinking water. But results from an outside lab received Monday indicated the algal bloom has diminished dramatically since last week, Kelson said.
Water treatment plant staff had increased the feed rate of powdered activated carbon (PAC), which helps with the odor, Kelson said. The amount of additional PAC will be eased off as the quality of the water coming into the plant continues to improve, Kelson said. PAC started getting added routinely to the drinking water mix in 2017.
