PHOTO BY RUBY F. MCALLISTER Tama County E-911 board chair Billie Van Egmond, left, listens as vice chair Tyler Sell, right, discusses changes they made to their board’s previously approved Fiscal Year 2025-26 budget proposal during the regular monthly meeting held on Feb. 11 at the county engineer’s office in Toledo. The changes were made in light of Tama County’s recent budget woes.

TOLEDO — Tama County’s 911 communications director and his now former employer have parted ways.

Jeremy Cremeans voluntarily entered into a severance agreement with the Tama County E-911 Service Board on Jan. 31, 2025 — an agreement that upon signature “immediately and completely” relieved him of any and all duties and responsibilities formerly assigned by the board.

“Our director is no longer with 911,” E-911 board vice chair, Traer Fire Chief Tyler Sell announced during a Tuesday, Feb. 11 board meeting. “It was an amicable split between our director and the executive board.”

While no official reason was provided during the meeting for Cremeans’ departure, according to the Iowa Regulatory Licensing online database for DIAL (Department of Inspections, Appeals, and Licensing) and HHS Public Health, his AEMT (Advanced Emergency Medical Technician) license is currently suspended with no disciplinary action listed as of press time.

According to Cremeans’ Severance and Release Agreement, which the newspaper obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the board will continue to pay his salary less normal withholding through March 7, 2025; he will also continue to receive a health insurance benefit continuation through that same time period plus “leave pay, including the accrued value of compensatory time off, vacation, and unused accrued vacation.”

Also as part of the agreement, the board agreed not to contest Cremeans’ application for unemployment insurance benefits, while Cremeans promised not to sue the board – and any of its related, subsidiary or affiliated entities, past and present – regarding his employment or termination. Cremeans also agreed that he had been “paid all monies owed to him due to his employment” and that “he is not aware of any injury he has sustained due to his work.”

“By making this Agreement,” the severance agreement states, “neither Employer nor Employee admit that they have done anything wrong, and each specifically disclaims any liability to or discrimination against the other on the part of themselves, their employees or affiliates, agents or representatives.”

Cremeans further agreed to “return any and all documents, files, or other written graphic, pictorial, or recorded materials, whether auditory or visual, as well as any and all physical equipment, materials, or supplies” belonging to Tama County on or before Jan. 31, 2025. He also agreed not to share confidential information “acquired or produced by him” during his tenure.

Cremeans was hired to the then-newly-created 911 director position (previously shared with Emergency Management) in the summer of 2020. During a June 3, 2020 meeting, then-Sheriff Dennis Kucera said during a joint meeting of the E-911 Service Board and Emergency Management Commission that he had interviewed three applicants for the new position; during the meeting, Cremeans was subsequently hired.

According to meeting minutes, Cremeans’ salary was then set at $49,000 with a six-month probation period. As of press time, Tama County’s 911 director position remains vacant.

On Monday, Feb. 10, newly-elected District 4 Supervisor Mark Doland (R-Toledo), who chairs the five-member Tama County Board of Supervisors, sent an email to all county department heads detailing a hiring freeze his board put in place earlier that day. The newspaper obtained a copy of the email through a FOIA request.

“Any new positions should have always been approved by the BOS [Board of Supervisors] and will be the protocol moving forward,” Doland wrote. “Additionally, the BOS would like to thank department heads and employees for understanding the need to cut any and all expenses that can be deferred until the next fiscal year beginning 7-1-2025. During these crucial times, we feel like our strength is in our employees and department heads. We have been through most of the first round of budget hearings. If you are funded through the general fund, we welcome any and all feedback as to solutions to balance our budget to avoid across-the-board budget cuts.”

The email also included both the hiring freeze general policy statement as well as an exemption request form for department heads to obtain permission from the board of supervisors to hire “essential staff.”

According to the policy statement, the hiring freeze applies to “new positions, replacement staff, full-time, part-time and temporary positions regardless of the funding source.”

On Feb. 11, Sell and E-911 board chair Billie Van Egmond said that 911 director duties are currently being handled by Tama County Sheriff Casey Schmidt, members of the E-911 executive board, and Tama County Emergency Management Coordinator Ryan Goodenbour — ‘depending on specialties.’

Radio tower security addressed

Also during the E-911 meeting, the board addressed recent security issues at the county’s radio tower sites. Without going into specifics, Sheriff Schmidt told the board that “in light of recent events,” RACOM service manager John Lauer had reached out to him to revisit Tama County’s action and safety plans for the radio system.

RACOM is a Marshalltown-based radio communications company.

“The first thing that we decided, given everything that’s happened in the last two months, was an automatic rekey of all the locks at the tower sites to mitigate any risk or liability that could come back on the 911 board and to have that added assurance that there is only one key for all of the new locks,” Schmidt said.

He also said Lauer recommended installing a mechanical combination lock for all the tower sites to “reduce the amount of keys that are out there.”

“Obviously,” Schmidt continued, “Tama County has invested quite a bit of money in the radio system, the radio towers. [It would] be very beneficial to invest in … a mechanical push button mechanism so that way, [if we need to change the code], we can.”

Installing security cameras at the radio tower sites was also discussed.

“Again, we invested a lot of time and money into these tower sites and, in talking with [Lauer], knowing some of the vulnerabilities … [I asked the question,] why didn’t we have cameras in the first place?” Schmidt said. “Moving forward, that’s something that we can look at as a board to see if we want to invest in … we [would] get an alert if somebody is out messing with the tower sites – we can have law enforcement respond and easily access that tower site without having to worry about [a key].”

While no action was taken on Feb. 11, Schmidt said Lauer was working on a quote for mechanical combination locks for consideration at a future meeting.

County budget crisis

Tama County’s E-911 board and emergency management commission both held separate public hearings on Feb. 11 in regard to their respective Fiscal Year 2025-26 budget proposals — finished proposals that had been thrown into considerable disarray due to the county’s recent budget problems.

On Feb. 7, Doland authored and posted on Facebook a letter addressed to Tama County Residents.

“Our new board came into office just a month ago to a dire financial crisis,” Doland wrote. “The previous board had an ending fund balance two years ago of just over $14 million. Our projected fund balance as of 6/30/25 was planned to be at around negative [$950,000]. That is a burn rate of overspending $7.5 million per year. It is unsustainable.”

Doland further said that, going forward, Tama County was going to have to “tighten” budgets and that he and his fellow supervisors would be “looking to our department heads” for ways to do so.

“I was in meetings today with the regulators at the Iowa Department of Management,” Doland said. “They minced no words. Our situation is unacceptable. They identified that our revenue has remained steady. It is their opinion that we have a spending problem.”

Doland said the board’s “immediate plan to make it through the rest of this fiscal year” – which ends on June 30, 2025 – was to utilize nearly $1 million in funds the E911 board “has returned to us to remain in the black.”

“Our utmost gratitude goes out to the E911 board for filling our huge hole in the disastrous budget that we inherited from the previous board,” Doland said to end his letter.

During the E-911 board’s Feb. 11 public hearing on the next fiscal year’s budget, Van Egmond and Sell presented the board with an amended budget – one they had “trimmed even more fat off of,” Van Egmond explained. If approved by the supervisors, funding from Tama County will drop from $1.6 million as proposed and approved by the E-911 board during its Jan. 14, 2025 meeting, to $1 million for the next fiscal year.

In addition to several line item reductions, there was also a reduction in interest from $57,000 to $24,000 on E-911 reserves due to the supervisors transferring $989,778.70 back into the general fund to make payroll between now and the end of the current fiscal year.

“The majority of the money that went back to [the general fund] was [leftover] from the radio project,” Sell told the newspaper following the Feb. 11 meeting.

The radio system project was completed in 2023 and, according to previous reporting by the newspaper, was funded with nearly $5 million in general obligation bonds as well as local option sales tax money and nearly $800,000 in E-911/emergency management reserve money.

At the conclusion of the Feb. 11 public hearing meeting, E-911 board members unanimously approved the reworked budget proposal.

When asked by the newspaper how the nearly $1 million transfer would affect the board’s future plans to one day build a new, combined 911 communications/emergency operations center on Tama County-owned land south of the landfill, Van Egmond replied, “There’s a hitch in our plans.”

Tama County’s 911 Communications Center is currently housed in the basement of the 159-year-old Tama County Courthouse in downtown Toledo. The courthouse building – completed in 1866, according to historical records — was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1981.