FAIRMONT — Martin County commissioners have authorized a $20,000 expense in an effort to help the county win a $20 million grant from the state Legislature.

The board this week heard from Robert Long of Larkin Hoffman Attorneys of Minneapolis, and agreed to pay the firm $5,000 per month through May. The firm will devise a detailed plan to address the county’s bonding request for $20 million, half the amount needed for a new justice center/jail in Martin County.

“The good news is bonding bills don’t have early deadlines,” Long said. “They’ve already set deadlines for policy bills to come out of committees, but you’re very fortunate because you already had the bills introduced last year. You’ve already laid a lot of good groundwork.

“The way we work is we become your extra set of boots on the ground up at the Capitol to make sure the bill is getting all the proper hearings. It’s a lot of meeting with the staff of both the capital investment committees of both the House and the Senate.

“They’re going to be assembling two different bonding bills, and the governor has a pretty big bonding number out there, and the Republican side in the Senate has a lower number. So we’ll be working though the politics of making sure the companion bills go through the two committees and get in both of the House and Senate bonding bills. Hopefully these two are both in the same line items and the same amounts.

“Then what happens is these bonding bills go to a conference committee and they go through them. It really comes down to the last minute sometimes. These bonding bills are usually the last things they do in the final days because there’s so much negotiation going on around other things, and this is not a budget year.”

Long said he feels positive that the county’s proposal is a good one, and he is hopeful that at least partial funding can be obtained.

“I think one of the challenges with bonding bills for jail facilities is that there’s been a long-standing history of the Legislature not fully funding bonding requests for jails in the full amounts,” he said. “Some counties do it on their own and [state lawmakers] don’t want to set a precedent that they’re going to fund every single county jail around the state. You’ve got a great proposal, and I’m very confident that we can get you a major chunk of money, whether we get the full funding or not.”