Alba Council ponders personnel, again

By TOMMY ANDERSON

tommyanderson@suddenlink.net

Posted 4/12/17

What appeared to be a rather short agenda took the Alba City Council two hours to work through last Monday, April 6. A large portion of that time was spent rehashing items that have appeared on the …

This item is available in full to subscribers.

Please log in to continue

Log in

Alba Council ponders personnel, again

Posted

What appeared to be a rather short agenda took the Alba City Council two hours to work through last Monday, April 6. A large portion of that time was spent rehashing items that have appeared on the agenda in the past, and some will be on the agenda again in the future as no definitive decisions were made on them in the meeting.

One of those items is the revision of the personnel policy which has been the source of council conversation for many months. The council did make a bit of progress on the topic Monday night as they had a copy of the Sulphur Springs personnel manual to review.

Alderman Preston “Sonny” Hass commented, “This is based on Sulphur Springs and a lot of it does not fly for us. There are things in this that will never apply to a town the size of Alba. We need to get something from towns our size and have a workshop on it with the city attorney and see if we can’t get something that fits us.”

A committee of Hass, Alderperson Tammy Kirkpatrick, and Mayor Ted Levitt had previously been selected. It was suggested that the personnel manual from a smaller town such as Point be obtained and utilized along with the Sulphur Springs document to help draft a manual for Alba.

Walter Smith, who owns property at 309 Farrington in Alba, had a water meter issue on the agenda to discuss with the council.

“We do not live in the house right now, we have not since 2002, but we have kept the utilities on all this time. We have paid a minimum water bill most of the time for all those years. Last month we turned on the water and filled up the 30-gallon hot water tank and the tank on the commode a couple of times. That is all the water we used, but we got a water bill for 40,000 gallons of water. The meter reading on my bill was 111768 but the mayor looked at the meter with me after I got the bill and the meter only read 111762. Something is not right. I don’t think I should suddenly have to go from paying a minimum water bill to paying a $200 water bill, especially when I haven’t used any more water,” Smith said.

Public Works Director Paul Kelbe told the council he had gone to the residence and removed the meter, taken it in and run a comparison test on it and a new meter and found that it read slightly less water passing through than the new meter. He installed the new meter at the Smith property and will see how the usage records on this new meter for a month. The council will hold off on any decision until next month of usage passes.

The city had advertised recently for applicants for water and wastewater operator, and City Secretary Lindy McCarty reported 11 applications had been received. Kelbe said he had reviewed all of them and had interviewed a number of the applicants, to which end he selected two to present to the council. One of the applicants was highly qualified and had some advanced licenses, but did not have all the required licenses needed to fill this position. The second finalist was much less experienced, but was a local person who was driving some distance to do the same kind of work in another city and was looking to get a job closer to home.

After lengthy discussion, the council approved offering the position to Kenneth Aglan of Alba at $15 per hour with 50 cents more per hour raise to be granted with each of the four licenses he will need for all the operations the city needs for him to do.

In other actions Monday night the council approved advertising for a bank depository, approved a resolution denying proposed rate increases by SWEPCO and discussed, but took no action on how to be sure all vendors who operate at events in Alba collect and pay sales tax. Kelbe reported that shutoff valves for the water main across Highway 69 had been obtained, but the installation was delayed due to a shortage of manpower. The council also took no action on updating an interlocal agreement for Wood County to do hot mix street repairs in lieu of hiring a contractor.