ASHEBORO — The Randolph County Board of Commissioners approved a $1.48 million contract with IMS Correctional Healthcare for medical care at the detention center during its meeting Monday.
The agenda for the regular business meeting primarily consisted of contractual matters.
“Currently, we’re with Medico,” said chief deputy Steven Nunn. “But we’ve been less than happy with the service they’ve provided over the last couple of years from staffing issues to some other issues that have come up.”
According to Nunn, the contract was bid out in March and the department received seven different responders ranging in cost from $1.4 million to $2.4 million.
IMS’s bid also came in around $500,000 less than Medico’s.
“We’ve spent some time vetting these companies and this is who we kind of hoped would come in at the lowest because we were satisfied with what they said,” Nunn said.
IMS is a North Carolina-based company that has been around since 2000 and it serves 30 other jail facilities in the state.
The board also approved a $627,000 contract with Piedmont Service Group for HVAC replacements at the Shaw Building.
“The building was built in the 1970s as a bank and then the county purchased it in the early 1990s for county use,” county engineer Paxton Arthurs said. “Because of the age of the system, we hired a mechanical engineer to evaluate it and he basically came back and said that the cooling system was at or past its useful life and recommended that it be replaced.”
Finally, the board approved an approximately $450,000 contract with Enterprise Permitting and Licensing Software for central permitting software.
“We’ve had a struggle for a very long time with the software that we’ve used in central permitting,” IT director R.J. Williamson said. “It’s become quite cumbersome and impactful not just to the various business units within the county that use this software but also to citizens, developers and anybody who’s looking to come into Randolph County. What we have is proving to be not optimal.”
Williamson said the county has existing funds set aside for this purpose and no additional funding is required.
The Randolph County Board of Commissioners will next meet June 1.
