Cerro Gordo County to examine proposal to share County Engineer with Floyd County

MASON CITY — The Cerro Gordo County Board of Supervisors has agreed to enter into discussions about possibly sharing the County Engineer’s position with Floyd County.

Supervisor Chris Watts says he was approached by an outgoing and incoming member of the Floyd County Board of Supervisors about helping out the county either on a short-term or long-term basis as they are losing their current county engineer.

Cerro Gordo County Engineer Brandon Billings says he’s ok with doing it on a temporary basis to start but he also wants to get a better understanding of how the Floyd County department works.   “I’d like to make sure that there’s a lot of very specific guidelines as to what role I’ll play in the interim as a temporary. What that would do is give us time to look at the system and the employment and just everything going on over there to see what level of involvement each county would have so we’d know what kind of sharing agreement would have to be made, or if there’s things that I don’t think  would be too detrimental to me to my time here to be handling over there.”

Billings says he thinks he’d need about six months to serve in the interim period to see if sharing the engineer position would be the right fit. “It will give me time to look over that program and the different budget levels they have in their federal funds and their different projects, and then to get to know their staff and how they do things, so I can see if there’s a good internal flow on how they handle things, and if they are going to be independent half the time, if it’s shared, so I have to be sure I’m confident that the staff can handle that.”

A joint discussion between the two counties was proposed by the Cerro Gordo supervisors at their meeting this week.