JONES SAYS FIRST CLASS MOVE WON'T BRING MORE SPENDING

JACKSON -- Becoming a first class county won't lead to wasting money, Cape Girardeau County Presiding Commissioner Gerald Jones told a gathering of 20 members of the Jackson Chamber of Commerce Monday.

Jones, who was guest speaker at the chamber's annual banquet, said the county's advancement to first class because it has maintained an assessed valuation of more than $450 million for the past five years won't mean undue spending on a medical examiner and county counselor.

First class counties in Missouri are required to have a medical examiner instead of a county coroner. Jones told the group that his research indicated the county would spend as much as $100,000 more a year for a medical examiner.

"For about a year and a half, the county commission has been working on our first class status change, and we've got everything prepared," Jones said. "When I got to looking into the medical examiner real close, that wasn't a good deal at all. Our coroner's doing a good job; the coroner system works in Cape County."

Jones said he talked with a few retired doctors in the area about becoming a medical examiner.

"They asked, 'What do I have to do?'" he said. "I explained it and they said, 'Well, if you think I'm going to go out on the interstate and look at dead bodies at 2 in the morning, you're wrong."

He was told that most of the doctors would hire county Coroner John Carpenter as an assistant medical examiner.

"There goes that bill through the roof," Jones said.

Instead, Jones sought and the legislature granted a bill for Cape Girardeau County to retain its coroner.

It wasn't just the coroner that Jones decided to keep on. He struck a deal with Prosecuting Attorney Morley Swingle to continue representing the county in its legal matters. Jones' deal required the county to hire an additional legal assistant for Swingle in return for his services.

Jones said the county hopes to pave more of its 421 miles of roads, of which 63 miles already are surfaced.

"We've adopted a five-year road improvement plan, which, by the way, we just simply went out and took road counts for the past year and identified the most heavily traveled roads in the county," he said. "Now we're going to start paving them. We've got $250,000 dedicated to paving roads. It'll cost us about $30,000 a mile, so we'll get about nine or 10 miles done this year.

"But nine or 10 miles is more than we've had. We'll just keep chipping away at it."