Lending a Helping Hand

About the Program

Category: County Administration and Management (Best in Category)

Year: 2021

Yankton County Equalization staff (Director, Lori Mackey; Deputy Director, Matt Archer; Appraiser, Michelle Goeken; Appraiser/GIS, Jeff Puthoff; Field Person, Andrea Wright; and Sales Ratio Clerk, Nancy Brockmoller) lent a helping hand to other departments this past year. When COVID-19 hampered their usual work which involved public interaction, Matt Archer reached out to other departments and found they could help:• Absentee Ballot Deluge The staff assisted the Auditor’s office to process an unprecedented number of requests to mail absentee ballot for both the primary and fall elections within the required 3-day time limit. Nancy Brockmoller continued to help them with other projects. • FEMA Requirements Major floods in 2019 severely damaged county roads and bridges. Understaffed and running out of time, the Highway Department found it was going to be difficult to complete claim paperwork for FEMA by the deadline. FEMA exacerbated the problem by changing the contact person five times as well as the forms and data required for reimbursement. Andrea Wright spent several months organizing and inputting data to complete the paperwork in time. This resulted in the county receiving approximately $2 million in financial assistance for road and bridge repair. • Employee Handbook A professional firm was revising the employee handbook. Few staff made time to review drafts, however, Michelle Goeken and Lori Mackey checked each draft, line by line noting spelling and grammatical errors and making suggestions to clarify or correct wording. Most of their edits were incorporated into the final draft. • Wage Matrix The need for a new wage study had been discussed by department heads and the commission in the past with no action taken. In August, a committee was formed of Cheri Loest--County Commission Chair, Lori Mackey and Matt Archer. The staff gathered pertinent information and the foundations of the matrix were drafted. The matrix was adopted to begin 2021. No extra funds were spent in the preparation of the matrix whereas a neighboring county had just paid over $40,000 for a wage study. • GIS Mapping Jeff Puthoff Improved the accuracy of the GIS parcel layer making updates to 2300 parcels. By year end the Equalization staff logged 855 man-hours assisting other departments in addition to their day-to-day operations.