Martin County commissioners heard from County Attorney Terry Viesselman on Tuesday concerning his office’s new involvement handling cases for the city of Fairmont.

“With the recent vacancy in the Fairmont City Attorney’s Office, our office has picked up doing the prosecution on an interim basis for them,” Viesselman said. “We had told them that if it was going to be a sudden transition period we would just do it at an hourly rate while we negotiate with them.

“I know they’re exploring all the possibilities on what they want to do and, at some point, we will submit a bid to them to do a contract on an annual basis. That’s not a for-sure thing, because they’re going to explore to see if there’s other people interested, but right now we have a big stack of files they brought over, so we’re busy as usual.”

Viesselman also noted that his office is negotiating with the city of Truman to handle its prosecution as well.

The board heard from Emergency Management director Abigail Nesbit, who gave an update concerning a preliminary public damage assessment for the state after spring flooding and an April ice storm that caused widespread damage.

“For the state to declare a disaster, we have to reach $7 million in damages, and we’re at $36 million for the state,” she said. “So we’re going to a FEMA-declared disaster that will hopefully be state-led.

“For Martin County, we’re at almost $1.6 million in public property damages. Compared to last year’s tornado, that was only $102,000 in damage and the summer floods were at $1.1 million, so this spring has been detrimental to the county.”

Commissioners approved a motion to authorize the installation of a veterans marker at Wolter Park in East Chain.

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