The Board of County Commissioners of Carroll County held an open session on Thursday, June 4, 2026, at 9:00 a.m. in the County Office Building, Room 311. The meeting included priority reports from commissioners, approval of seven agenda items, public comments, and an administrative session and agenda review. All votes were unanimous.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Thursday, June 4th, 2026 open session for the Carroll County Board of Commissioners. As we always do, we'll begin with a Pledge of Allegiance and a moment of silent reflection. For which it stands one nation under God and indivisible with liberty and justice for all everybody is doing well. It is a beautiful day outside, and even though I know that summer calendrically doesn't begin seasonally, it's definitely begun. So I hope everybody's doing well today. Uh Commissioner Krebs, we'll begin with you for priority. Carol. Thank you. I think I have some photos here because um keep that one on for a second. On Sunday last week, we had the opportunity, my husband and I went up to Manchester uh Fire Volunteer Fire Department's live burn exercise. I'm like, what's a live burn exercise? Well, this was unbelievable. We ended up staying for five hours. It was just an intensely impressive, um, very time consuming to set this up. It was a live burn of an older, an old house, hundred-year-old house, um, that the property owner has been abandoned, so they wanted to have it taken down. And they used the opportunity to practice and and train in um for for the volunteers and also for some of the the um young people in training. Took very months of planning for this because it's you know it needs to be very controlled. But this is the attic, and they showed us in the attic and what things look like. And it was interesting to learn that old homes actually are very, very well built and act can withstand fire much more than a new home is made out of particle board. Um, but this is the attic, and this is some things that they put in to actually start the fire in the attic, and you'll see some other pictures later. But uh Chief Andy Franklin was explaining you know the preparation. It took months to prepare for all this, a number of uh fire departments, uh over half a dozen, a couple from Pennsylvania, a couple from Baltimore County, then uh four or five from Carroll County, all coordinated um with the trainers and and bringing folks in and teaching them setting things on fire, teaching them how to put it out in different situations, and I learned all about the equipment that's used, the different hoses, uh the pumpers and you know how they get water. I mean, learned a ton in that. I mean, we weren't gonna stay long and we stayed all end up staying all day. So uh you can move the pictures to the next one so we can see um this is when it first got started. They they boarded things up for safety reasons, but you can see everything lined up. Um it was a beautiful, beautiful day. And then the next picture shows when they they started the first fire up in the left corner, and you can start seeing it coming out, and you can see the buckle in the back, the rear on the left, the the siding started to buckle because of the heat. And then they have these heat monitors, I forget the name of them, where you can tell you know where the heat is in the house, and it's a little piece of equipment so that they can tell where the hot spots are, and then communicate that stuff with their um someone that may be inside of the the building. Constant communication, constant coordination, you know, who shows up first and the different pieces of equipment that are needed for a different uh there they're it's getting hotter upstairs. But I was very impressed, and I'm always impressed with our uh whole depart our whole fire EMS system. But these are mostly vol they're all volunteers and the training that's required. I mean, they were there, they got their 730 in the morning and were there well after we left. And that's their whole day. It was a beautiful day, but the um professionalism and the training and the commitment to service of our volunteers uh just to be ready for anything is incredible. So there's that b that thing that shows the heat, how hot it is getting in the building. Flip the picture. That's Chief Robinson was there. That's John Krebs the fifth, who's a 911 operator, and also um volunteer fire department line line borough. Uh many of these guys are professional professionals somewhere else, and they still volunteer, and many of them are just volunteers. So a kudos to all the volunteers and the amount of time it takes. And there's the roof going up. You can flip it again. That's it about a couple hours later. Um and then I was didn't stay much longer than that, but it took hours and hours to get the whole thing burned down and a tremendous amount of coordination and time. Then we all went to graduations this week and uh went to Century High School. It was a 23rd annual graduation. Hard to believe it's been 23 years. The impressiveness of the graduations we went to this year.