County commissioners approve amendment to law library budget

To stay in line with laws recently updated by the 89th Texas Legislature, the Stephens County Commissioners Court recently approved an amendment to its law library budget for the purchase of new materials. 

In total, 835 bills took effect Monday, Sept. 1 and the county’s law library must stay up-to-date on its information and source materials. The commissioner’s court approved the amendment Monday, Sept. 8.

“There are some updated statute books that the law library has the funds available for,” County Judge Michael Roach said. “It’s maybe not in this year’s budget, but the law library has its own cash fund and September 1, a lot of these laws changed.”

Roach noted that there were significant changes in the family code and Country Attorney Gary Trammel requested certain library books for the law library.

“These are the books that we would order to replace the old ones in there and they’re not last year’s books. Some of these things are five or 10 years old and they need updating,” Roach said. “We have LexisNexis; we pay for a subscription every year. We’re required by statute…to keep an updated law library. So we do that with a computer terminal and that qualifies, but sometimes there are issues that these books are very helpful [for].”

While the court didn’t budget for the purchase of the books, they only had to amend the budget to transfer funds over from the law library, which had $21,962 in it, according to County Treasurer Kelsey Cornwall, to allow for the purchase. 

Sheriff Roach requests generator repairs

Stephens County Sheriff Kevin Roach informed the court during the public comment portion of the meeting that the generator at the Law Enforcement Center is in need of repairs. 

“The solid state control went out on it, and it’s going to cost a little over $2,000 to fix it. Apparently, that part went obsolete in 2017 and we put several replacements in 2018, so we had to convert it to new,” Sheriff Roach said. “Anyway, we were able to save a few dollars by buying it directly from the company instead of having the electrician buy it and reselling it to us.”

The sheriff said that there is a 60-day turnaround, so he needed to get the ball rolling on the new generator now. The issue with the generator occurred too late for any official discussion to be had at the Monday, September 8 meeting, but it will be on the agenda for the next official meeting.