Johnston: State of the county is good

Despite the hardships brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, Ohio County Judge-Executive David Johnston said that the state of the county “is good.”

“This is the 11th state of the county address I’ve given you. This will be quite a bit different because there has never been a year like the one that has just passed or the one that we are still in” Johnston said during the Ohio County Chamber of Commerce’s first-ever virtual meeting last week.

Johnston said the virus itself has been “devastating” to the county as over 3,000 Ohio Countians have tested positive and 55 have died to date due to the virus.

The closings and restrictions on businesses last year in an effort to stop the spread of the virus hurt the local economy “desperately” as well, Johnston said.

“It’s going to take a long time to get people back into their habits of going to the places that they did before this virus hit us,” he said.

Local businesses have taken a big blow during the pandemic and some have suffered to the point they couldn’t recover, Johnston said.

“On the positive side, our county government has fared well,” he said noting that none of the county’s services have had to be discontinued.

He credits the county’s financial stability to CARES Act money from the federal government.

The county did have a great deal of lost revenue, but what saved the county was CARES Act money that came to the state and passed down by Gov. Andy Beshear to counties, he said.

According to Johnston, the county couldn’t use that money to replace lost revenue but they could use it to pay for things that were already in the budget that the county might not have been able to pay for had it not been for CARES Act money, such as first responders and law enforcement.

“That freed up enough money to offset the lost revenue,” Johnston said. “Our county didn’t struggle at all financially during (the pandemic).

We worried that we would at times, but it never happened.”

Johnston said he and the court have a lot of ambition for the county in the next few years.

“When I came in office, one of the hot topics to talk about was roads and bridges,” he said. “We’ve come a long, long way on that and continue to through this year. We’ll continue to make great strides on that and I’m very hopeful in the next very few years the county fiscal court will be able to change the subject and talk about other things besides our transportation needs and talk about economic development and quality of life.”

One thing that he hopes the county can focus on is “ridding ourselves of the drug plague that we have had for many years.”

He is looking forward to creating boards and committees to address the issue in the next year. He said he believes that the county cannot totally focus on law enforcement to take care of the issue and that the county has to look at prevention and treatment to help solve the problem.

Another problem in the county Johnston said he is desperate to address is the lack of broadband.

“It’s not that the fiscal court and others haven’t worked on it and put the effort and funds into it,” he said. “Millions of dollars have been put into it, but no improvement has been seen at this point.”

He planned to appoint a board during the next fiscal court meeting to look into finding a solution to the problem.

“This thing is going to be serious,” he said. “To try to seek out the expertise and we’ll probably spend some money on studying the issue and figuring out just where the need is and what it’s going to take to solve it.”

Johnston said there was a lot of “fiber hanging on a lot of poles in the county that is not hooked up on either end” and that no customer has been served by it. He said he gets more calls on the county’s broadband problems than any other.

“We are going to be working on that diligently within the next year.”

Johnston ended his address by urging Ohio Countians to get their vaccines as it is the only way for the county to “get some way of normal back.”

Approximately 50% of those eligible have received at least one dose of a vaccine, he said.

“Please get out there and get that vaccine. Preach it to your employees and your family. Get that word out. That is the answer to us getting back to normal.”