MASON CITY – The Cerro Gordo County Board of Supervisors met for its regular weekly meeting Tuesday morning.
A check for $100,000 to reimburse Cerro Gordo county for expenses related to the award-winning Precint Atlas software was presented to the county from the Iowa Precinct Atlas Consortium (IPAC). The agency’s President, Dennis Parrott, made the trip all the way from Newton, in Jasper county, to present the over-sized check.
The Precinct Atlas software – developed by software engineers who work for Cerro Gordo county along with Auditor Ken Kline, who gave the programmers direction and input – has steadily caught on around the state. At this time, 55 Iowa counties are fully utilizing the software to better administer elections.
Supervisor Bob Amosson explained that the county’s role in developing the software was questionable until IPAC was created to handle distribution of the product.
“Once we saw that this was such a good product and it was gonna go places, I think we was kind of wondering, you know, what’s our role in government here? Is it to take care of the elections in the state of Iowa or run Cerro Gordo county? So my hat’s off to you and your people for saying hey, we’ll gladly do this and reimburse us,” Supervisor Amosson said to Mr. Parrott.
“You guys should be very very proud,” Mr. Parrott told the board. “You guys have had a major impact on elections in the state of Iowa.”
In other county business, County Engineer Mary Kelly gave a brief road report, a drainage agreement between the Iowa Department of Natural
Resources and Cerro Gordo County was signed pertaining to a drainage district project and a Letter of Support was authorized for the Pyrotechnics Guild International Convention to be held at the North Iowa Events Center in August 2014.
Watch video of entire meeting:
Outstanding. Good things do happen from home grown players.
This article doesn’t specifically name the county software engineers who worked on the program. It’s too bad they didn’t get credit along with the Supervisors, who didn’t do anything, except perhaps approve the project.
Katie that’s a good point. I named the current MIS Department members under their photo, but it was never really made clear to me who exactly did the lion’s share of the programming. I do know these two gentlemen have a lot of programming talent and they were asked to pose with the check, so I believe they had a hand in the work; they are from Cerro Gordo county.
I see a raise of pay in the future of the county board of supervisors…Mr. Urdahl is drooling at the prospect of that. He is cheap when it comes to his money but is a big spender with other peoples money being the good damnacrat he is.
The residents of Cerro Gordo county should be very proud of there auditors office. The profesionalism in this office is outstanding !!!!
Well, you can thank Ken Kline for this!!!! His hard work and dedication to the software has made Cerro Gordo County the envy of the State in this arena. Interesting that the Supervisors and IT people were there for the photo-ops, but not Ken… I suppose Urdahl made sure he didn’t know about the honor…