EATON — Preble County Commissioners on Wednesday, June 15, received quarterly reports from the microfilm department and the Emergency Management Agency.

Microfilm Director, Erica Davis reported to the commissioners about the progress she has made as requests for materials increase. According to Davis, she has had approximately 10 percent more requests for microfilm this year compared to last year. She has also scanned over 250,000 pages so far this year, which is 68 percent of the entire 2021 year.

Davis explained the costs to microfilm are roughly $8,000. Commissioners and Davis discussed how to save the county money on microfilming. According to Davis the best and most efficient way to store the information she has scanned is to switch to cloud-based storage.

“It coincides with our bigger plan as a county to have the documents accessible to everyone,” Commissioner Adam Craft agreed.

Davis and commissioners will continue to research information on how to move microfilm storage from servers to the cloud.

Preble County Emergency Management Director Dave Anderson presented his report about the Emergency Management Agency (EMA) and National Incident Management System (NIMS).

Anderson explained he has begun a rewrite of the Emergency Operations Plan (EOP). He has met with his committee and other entities to complete a new EOP.

Anderson also reported he has completed a tabletop exercise with two evaluators and a state facilitator but unfortunately was cut short during the exercise due to other events.

The meeting continued with a public hearing for a six-year ditch review of the Brown, Benner, Vanzant, and Plummer ditches in the county

Presenter during the hearing was James Simmons from the Preble County Engineer’s ditch department. Simmons explained to a group of about 10 county residents in attendance which ditches were under maintenance of the county and which were considered the responsibility of the property owners.

During the presentation, members of the public were welcome to ask questions. Numerous residents came forward to tell Simmons the ditches which were the responsibility of the county for maintenance were not properly taken care of. Several who spoke were farmers who said they had taken care of the ditches themselves for many years by doing work like tiling to prevent flooding.

According to Simmons, getting feedback was the purpose of the presentation. He invited any resident who had additional questions or concerns to come to the Engineer’s Office to speak with him.