Scotland County Commissioners Bo Frizell, John Alford and Darwin Williams converse before the commencement of the board’s regular business meeting held Monday at the Scotland County Emergency Operations Center. The meeting was recessed to 9 a.m. on March 27 at the Morgan Center Conference Room.
Tomeka Sinclair | The Laurinburg Exchange
LAURINBURG — Scotland County’s manager said she is hopeful that the county’s Department of Social Services will be business as usual by the end of the month after a halt caused by the December cyber incident resulted in a server shutdown.
County Manager April Snead gave the response after Commissioner Darrel “BJ” Gibson inquired about when the department would be back to working at its normal capacity.
“I’m hoping, because they started in DSS today, by the end of March we will start to see that,” Snead answered.
Snead said that VC3, the county’s Information Technology service provider, spent Monday bringing DSS users back up on their regular desktop computers “so as we slowly move through those desktop computers, the laptops can, of course, be pushed to other staff.”
The county’s server has been down since the cyber incident occurred, and VC3 has been working to rebuild Scotland’s server.
“Finally people can actually see the progress instead of just believing me when I say were building it on the back end … I’m not going to say our network is totally built but our network is very close,” Snead said.
Opioid Settlement
In other business, commissioners approved allocating $160,000 of opioid settlement funding to Scotland County Schools. The money will fund the Safe Choice: Build Resilience Against Opioid Misuse curriculum which aims to “educate students about the risks of opioid misuse, promote healthy decision-making and life skills, foster early intervention, and create a community-focused approach to prevent opioid abuse.”
Snead said the funding will employ two positions, one that will work with elementary-age students and one for middle and high school students.
The county’s opioid settlement funding balance is about $900,000, according to the county manager. Only $600 has been spent thus far but funding has been allocated to multiple programs.
“It’s coming in faster than we can spend it,” Commissioner Tim Ivey said.
Solid Waste
Also Monday, commissioners sent an amended solid waste ordinance back to the drawing board for further edits and potential increased fining fees for solid waste infraction enforcement.
Snead told the board that updates to the ordinance do not include any major programmatic changes, but instead focused more on clarifying outdated language, however, commissioners Ivey and Clarence McPhatter struggled to see where the text clearly defined “illegal dumping.”
“I might say ‘I don’t think it’s illegal’ but your terminology may be different,” McPhatter said.
“So ‘illegal dumping’ is not defined in there which of course leads it to some discretion,” Snead said.
When asked if the language should be ‘firmed up more,’ the county attorney pointed out that the definition is partially defined in the ordinance but should be relocated and placed in other sections of the ordinance.
“You have a partial definition in there. It’s just under a separate section. You may want to move it over … expand it some,” Attorney Edward Johnston said.
“I will say these ordinances at times can be hard to follow. They are long and we did not revise the placement of things,” Snead said.
In other business, the county commissioners:
— Approved a resolution supporting placing a polling site in Scotland County for LREMC Board of Directors elections. Currently, if LREMC’s more than 2,700 customers wish to vote, they must travel to Pembroke to do so.
— Approved the following policies: Employment of a Relative, Longevity, Smoke and Tobacco Free Ground Facilities, Use of County Property, and Grievance Procedure.
— Made note that the county has one vacancy for the Planning and Zoning Board, two for the ABC Board and two for the Board of Equalization and Review.