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Our invocation was offered by Kathy Austvold while Katie Johnson led the 15 members physically present (and one via Zoom) in song. Due to weather, it was announced that the highway cleanup was again being postponed, this time to Thursday, June 2nd at 6:00 p.m. Kathy Austvold was the winner of the grand prize, $1,000, from our spring raffle and was presented with her check. She has a worthy cause she will support with part of the funds. Tim Hunt started the bragging, noting the next day he was heading to the Twin Cities to pick up a son and daughter-in-law and their youngest daughter visiting from Boston. Steve Andrews followed with a report he had his Bentley out for the first time the prior day. Katie Johnson was happy to have her son home on a visit from Bozeman, Montana. Randy Kempfer lauded his son Harry's baseball team that lost in the semi-finals of a tournament. Jacklin Steege is looking forward to June 23rd when United Way will host the Little Black Dress and Little Black-Tie event at Elks Point with a 1920's theme; tickets are available at the United Way office for $30.00. John MacFarlane announced all his grandchildren have now completed high school with the most recent graduation, while another grandchild is graduating from college (not UND so I was surprised John mentioned the name) and another is receiving his master's from the University of Minnesota. Our program was Preston Berg who is the program coordinator at the Otter Tail County Jail. Preston and his wife have two children and he has been employed at the jail for eight years, currently with the rank of sergeant. In his position, Preston is in charge of all volunteers, the work release program and the Sentence to Serve program. The latter is designed to give inmates confidence and maybe something they can put on a resume once they have completed their sentence and are looking for a job; it also gives the workers something to feel positive about in an admittedly negative environment. To serve on a crew, the person has to be vaccinated against COVID, a non-violent offender and approved by the court. A recent project completed through one of the crews was the redo at the Salvation Army store -- attending the grand re-opening one Rotarian recalled how proud the person he spoke to was of their work. Crews also do a lot of work for non-profits and townships, while the County is the most frequent user of the program. Noting the jail is a congregate facility, Preston stated that part of his job includes scheduling the many religious programs provided to inmates (a former inmate is now the jail's chaplain). The County has two staff members that serve as leaders for the Sentence to Serve crews and are thereby limited by the number of prisoners that can participate -- they have more workers than they can send out. Each party utilizing a Sentence to Serve Crew is charged $2.00 per person hour of work, and the workers also get $10 per hour credited against their court fees. If interested in having a Sentence to Service crew, the application can be downloaded by visiting the Otter Tail County Jail website. Both the proposal form and the necessary contract are available on-line. The Sentence to Serve program is common in Minnesota and has contributed to the needs of many non-profits and governmental units in our County. |
