Published: Thursday, March 7, 2013 1:07 AM CST

Due to security and logistical concerns, local city and county officials have decided to no longer use Yankton schools as polling stations.The Yankton County Commission discussed the development Tuesday after being made aware that a decision was made by election officials to remove Yankton Middle School (YMS) from the list of polling stations.

During the general election of 2012, Yankton County, in collaboration with the Secretary of State, piloted the e-pollbook and voting center concept. By virtue of the new concepts, there is less of a need for as many precincts and voting centers.

“With the new concept in place, voters in a jurisdiction can go to any voting center to cast their ballots,” Yankton School District (YSD) business manager Jason Bietz said. “At a polling place, they will sign in through the e-pollbook and the polling center will have record of them voting. This replaces the need for precincts.”

Following the Sandy Hook school shooting in December, Bietz met with Yankton County Auditor Paula Jones and city Finance Officer Al Viereck to discuss safety concerns with the use of schools as polling places.

During their meeting, officials agreed that the city and school elections in the spring should also use the polling center concept in order to save money.

“As part of the meeting, we all evaluated logical polling sites. The concerns we have for some of the sites include accessibility, being single story and having sufficient access to restrooms,” Bietz said. “This gets us down to only a handful of eligible places to use as potential polling centers.”

Officials came to the conclusion that YMS and Lincoln Elementary School were not ideal polling centers because of logistics for the district. There is not enough parking and little access to restrooms, but district officials made it work in the past because they felt it was important to the   community.

Bietz, Viereck and Jones have mutually agreed to start getting elections out of school buildings.

“When you have a polling center in a school, you have people coming and going freely,” Bietz said. “We have never had an incident in Yankton where we needed to lock down the school on election day, but it would really hurt the election process if that happened.”

One of the new polling centers will be the Yankton County 4-H building, and the school board will utilize it for its upcoming election.

The other polling stations the county has designated for its elections are JoDean’s Steakhouse and Lounge, the Gayville Community Center, Broomtree Farms, the Lesterville Fire Station and The Rock House in the Lewis and Clark Lake area.

This differs from the polling stations that will be used in the school district’s and City of Yankton’s April elections. The only polling stations April 9 will be the 4-H facility, city hall and JoDean’s.

“There are not a lot of facilities in town that can be used for election centers,” Bietz said. “I’m not anticipating that we’ll be using school spaces again. We will continue to evaluate each election cycle based on turnout.”

During Tuesday’s County Commission meeting, Commissioner Mark Johnson said it was suggested that the county work with the district to potentially use the school administration building as a polling location.

“I don’t know if that helps us any for our elections to replace the middle school, since it is way over on the west edge of town,” he said. “However, they have plenty of room and there is a large conference room we can use.”

New potential voting center sites discussed by the commission included the Yankton Mall, Chan Gurney Airport, Hillcrest Golf Course or the NFAA Archery Center. However, commissioners expressed a desire to have a polling station on the northeast side of Yankton.

“We should be thinking about this while driving around town,” commissioner Donna Freng said.

P&D reporter Nathan Johnson contributed to this report.

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