You think your telephone bill is bad, it costs more than $8,000 a month to keep the Lawrence County Courthouse and other county offices wired.

But that may change soon since the Lawrence County Commissioners may have found a way to upgrade the system and still save thousands of dollars each month.

The county is working with SBC and system provider Inter-Tel Technologies Inc. to cut the bill significantly and still improve the system. It could save the county as much as $25,000 a year if the system is upgraded and then as much as $60,000 a year once the system is paid off in 5 years.

"Any time you can save money like that it is just great," said Commissioner George Patterson. "Most of the time you can't get people to work with you like that. It was tremendous."

Currently, the courthouse system - which includes the Dennis J. Boll Group Home, the EMA offices, the dog pound, the coroner's office and the sheriff's office and jail - has 162 phone lines and 162 phone numbers. Each line costs the county $35.62.

The proposed plan would allow them to use only 50 lines but still have all the numbers. A system upgrade would equip all the phones with modern services such as caller ID, voice mail, call waiting, etc.

"We can upgrade the actual phones and still save more than $20,000 a year," said Commissioner Jason Stephens. "That is the advantage of new technology. You are able to save money and provide a better service."

The companies will be at the courthouse next week to finalize exactly what the savings would be.

In other business Thursday, the commissioners asked the Ohio Emergency Management Agency and the state legislators to reconsider not declaring Lawrence County a disaster area after the flooding last month.

"We are asking FEMA and the other aid agencies to reconsider. They said we didn't have 25 houses with severe damage but we had lots of farmers who lost hay, tobacco, soybeans and other crops," Patterson said. "We would like them to look at it again and consider these types of losses."

Stephens said State Rep. Clyde Evans told him that he plans to personally write a letter to Gov. Bob Taft to look at these problems.

"I was really disappointed we didn't get the declaration initially," Stephens said. "There are people who are hurting so we need to look at every angle."