The Ramer City Commissioners meet at 7:00 p.m. on the fourth Monday of each month at the Ramer City Hall.

Ramer elects five commissioners to four-year terms, and the commissioners choose one of their number to serve as mayor.  Elections are held every two years, and the commissioners’ terms are staggered.

Ramer’s current mayor is George Armstrong, whose current term expires in 2008.

Ramers commissioners, with the year they come up for reelection, are:

    Kendall Summers (645-5709)     2008
    Tim Baker                                    2010
    David Dickey                               2010
    Bill Thomas                                 2010

Half of the hour-long April meeting of the Ramer Town Board was spent discussing and ultimately approving a contract with Farley Purvis for the regular inspection of Ramer's water tank.

The meeting began with the reading of the minutes from the March meeting, which were approved on a motion by Mayor George Armstrong, seconded by Bill Thomas.

Armstrong then suggested putting of a discussion of the audit until the next board meeting, to give the commissioners additional time to review it.

The mayor then reported to the board regarding the trash problem on Ramer-Selmer Road. "I talked with Ronnie Neill, who is our representative from MTAS, and this is kind of a sample ordinance of what we can do about, you know, cleaning the place up.  Residences, streets, whatever.  It addresses several things.  Dead animals, sanitation, slums, public water officer.  It covers junk yards, junk yard screening.

"There's a lot of stuff in here," Armstrong said, "and here's what he told me on the telephone.  This is worth just as much as we want to make it.  If we don't enforce it, it's not worth even writing up."

"Well," Thomas observed, "if we don't enforce it, we shouldn't even ask about it."  Thomas said that the town of can either have the owners clean them up "or we can do it at their expense, right?"

"If we pass these ordinances we can do that," Armstrong agreed.

"I, for one, think that should be passed," Thomas said, "because there's a lot of that old trashy stuff around here."

"When talking with this gentleman," Armstrong continued, "he said 'You're going to catch a lot of flack,' and he said, 'Rest assured, one of the commissioners will have a complaint raised against him.'  He said it never fails.  For whatever reason.  And this is comment I made to Bonnie.  If Kendall decides to park his tractor in front of his house, with a disk on it, and we've already teed somebody off and they drive by there, 'Look at that old tractor setting there!'  And they're going to call, and they're going to complain.  I'm just telling you some of the things that can go on, and probably will go on."

Armstrong suggests that the commissioners take copies of the proposed ordinance and look it over before the next meeting, "and then we can decide how we're going to enforce it, and if we're going to strictly enforce it.  I can tell you right now, I don't like to be told what I can do on my land that I pay taxes on—"

"I'm the same way, but …" Thomas interjected.

"—but I agree that some of this needs to be cleaned up," Armstrong concluded.

"Is there anything about condemned houses in there?" David Dickey asked.

Armstrong said that there was, and then Recorder Tabitha Dickey said, "I think these matters need to be gently approached, because you are going to open a can of worms when you start telling all these people what they're going to do.  I think you need to start out by, maybe a little letter, and explaining—

"Yeah," Armstrong agreed. "My raised beds, and my gardens might be offensive to somebody."

Tim Baker said, "basically, all we're wanting to do is get these old houses cleaned up.  I mean, it ain't like we're trying to change everybody's lives, here."

"But," Tabitha Dickey observed, "now if we go in there and clean one of these houses up and send them a bill for two or three thousand dollars, you know …."

"Yeah," Baker replied, "but I mean we're not going to do it right off the bat.  We've got to give them some kind of a notice."

"I'm sure we would," Armstrong agreed.

"Well," Thomas said, "the way I understand it, we've been trying to get them to do it for years."

The board then voted, on a motion by Armstrong, seconded by Tim Baker, not to meet in May because the fourth Monday of that month falls on Memorial Day this year.

After reviewing several other items mentioned in the minutes, Mayor Armstrong turned to Farley Purvis and said, "Looks like you're next."

"This is Farley Purvis," Armstrong said, of "Tank Consultants of Tennessee.  He knows this [tank] pretty well.  He is wanting to sign up the city on a, basically, what it is, a hundred dollar a month to do the various and sundry inspections."

Purvis told the board that he would inspect the tank annually and wash it out every five years.  "You’ve got some things going on with that tank that we're going to have to address at some point…. It's not a 'if,' it's a 'when.'…  There's going to be the place to where the tank is going to have to be done inside.  It's going to have to be blasted and painted and this kind of stuff.  And that's going to be tricky when it comes to that, because keeping the tank down that long, you've got just a lot of things."

Purvis explained that "the bad thing is, most of these tanks are going to have to be epoxy on the inside.  The bad thing is, once the blasting and painting is actually done, you've got seven to ten days of just setting there curing."

Bobby Wardlow of Ramer's utility department said that Ramer would be tied in with Eastview by the time this was done.

"Within ten years we should have that tank in good shape," Purvis explained.  "And that's going to mean getting money from some place.  That's probably going to mean painting the inside, probably going to mean painting the outside, within ten years."

Purvis explained that "the state requires professional inspection every five years.  If they come back in, this tank hasn't been washed out for ten years, you guys say you can't afford this, you can't afford that, you can't keep a tank up, they can come in and take over your tank….  That don't need to happen."

Armstrong summed up Purvis's proposal thusly: "If we go under contract with him, number one, he will inspect it every year, and then he will wash it every five years.  At the time he draws it down and washes it, if there is a bad, bad spot, that you can put this quad-epoxy on, he'll do that.  But, now, if he comes into something, that say, hey, that section right there has got to be sandblasted and be done, then he's going to come to the city and say, 'You need to have that done, and that's your expense.'"

Purvis added that "to blast and paint the inside of this tank, for instance, it's 4,800 square feet inside, the best price for most, just a blast and [unintelligible words] epoxy system, is about $4 a foot.  So 4,800 times $4 a foot, that would be about what the inside would cost to blast and put a system on it.  So, all of a sudden, see, you're looking at a little different deal.  That's something you don't want to find out, you didn't know about it Monday and all of a sudden you've got to pay for it on Wednesday.  You don't want that.  Annual inspections will stop that."

"There are some problems coming up with this tank that are going to have to be addressed," Purvis repeated, "and I know you guys don't have the money straight off to just do it."

Purvis said, "The one thing that I'm concerned about this tank more than anything else is that it's going to come to a redoing the inside.  Good possibility that tank's going to be down for over two weeks.  So you have to be hooked up [with Eastview].  You're not going to be able to survive something like that."

Thomas moved that the town accept Purvis's proposal.  Armstrong seconded, and the motion passed unanimously.

At the conclusion of the board's regular business Mayor Armstrong called on Peggy Berryman, who was in the audience.

"We’ve talked to you about this Modern Woodmen's program, John Hand project coming up Saturday," Berryman said.  "We're going to buy the poles to put the fence back up, and we're going to get weed killer, and we're going to clean off the tennis and basketball courts, and we're going to paint some of the playground equipment.  So, we're going to need all the help we can get, and we need everybody down there."

The meeting was then adjourned on a motion by Kendall Summers, seconded by Bill Thomas.

The March meeting of the Ramer Town Board got off to a late start.  Commissioner Bill Thomas rarely attends the meetings, and David Dickey was busy attending to insurance matters at the ballpark, but Tim Baker's unexpected absence left only Mayor George Armstrong and Commissioner Kendall Summers at the table, so the opening of the meeting was delayed for several minutes until Dickey could be summoned. 

"Well," Mayor Armstrong said, when Dickey arrived, "we finally got a quorum.  We'll open this city meeting, call to order and read the minutes from the last one, if you please."

"The FEMA deal," Armstrong said, reviewing the contents of the minutes after they had been approved on a motion by Armstrong, seconded by Dickey.  "I could be wrong about that 87.5%.  It could be 75%.  I'm not sure that Outdoors Unlimited's going to be covered.  But he [the FEMA representative] did take the bill with him, the last time he was here.  He took that bill with him.  He had originally told me that if it was under a thousand dollars it wasn't, you couldn't use it, it didn't qualify.  But he took it anyhow, so I don't know where we stand.  So it's somewhere between 87.5 and 75%.   I've heard both numbers dropped, and I've got a meeting Wednesday with him, we're supposed to finalize it, so we'll know more then.  He took all the stuff from the ballpark.  We are going to get some money for debris removal up at Jay Taylor Road.  How much, at this point I do not know.  I don't know about the lights.  I've talked to Billy [Broadway].  Billy's kind of waiting on me, I think.  I don't know what it is.  But anyhow.  The beer thing's okay.  Okay, we've got the civic center keys ….  All right, we discussed the 2006-7 audit, and asked that you take one and look over it.  We're going to put that off to next month.  Next month being April.  We need to try to get us an audit at our June meeting approved, so that we'll have an audit to start the first day of January.   Or July, that comes right after June."

Armstrong then read from the agenda, "Status on Ramer-Selmer Road," and turned to two of the three people in the audience, Aaron and Bunny Knight.

"It's the slums," Bunny Knight said, referring to the condition of the road on which she and her husband live.  "That's the best name I've got for it.  It's the slums….  I just wish everybody would drive down there and turn off that road.  Here's pictures.  I want everybody to look at them.  But they do not do it justice.  You have to see it to believe it."

"We ain't trying to be nasty about our neighbors," Aaron Knight added.  "We just want them to clean up a little bit."

Referring to the trash depicted in the photographs, Knight said, "If it was next door to any of y'all's houses, y'all would be down here the same as us."

"Is there not any kind of ordinance on the book," Bunny Knight asked, "where people have to maintain their property?"

"There is," Town Recorder Tabitha Dickey, acknowledged, "but the only repercussion is a $50 fine.  And the letter that I mail out, you never get the $50 fine back.  There's no reinforcement on the books to do to somebody if they don't pay it."

After both Knights elaborated on their concerns, Mayor Armstrong said, "The only thing I know to do is what I did on the beer issue, and whether or not we did this thing correctly when we had that, made those, those motions, whatever, is talk to MTAS or TML….  Now, they might have some guidelines that we could go by that we could enforce, without, you know, causing, you don't know what—"

"We didn't come over here to cause no hard feelings," Knight said.

Armstrong said that he had heard complaints for other people besides the Knights, then he repeated, "The only thing I can think of to do, can y'all think of anything other to do that what we can do, I mean the ordinance we've got, it just don't have enough teeth in it for anything."  He added that he would be glad to "call MTAS and see what kind of stuff they can come up with that a place like this can do."

"You know," Bunny Knight said, "that little road that we live on up there, that used to be one of the neatest, nicest roads there was in Ramer.  Everybody kept their place up, you know.  But it's not like that any more."

Armstrong said, "Only thing I can do, Bunny and Aaron, is get with MTAS and see if they can get me something that we can go to—"

"If that's all you can do, George, that's all you can do," Bunny Knight said.

"I'll find out," Armstrong said.  "Try to this week."

"All right," Armstrong then said, turning to Eddie Moore, the last of the three people in the audience, "Eddie, you're next."

"First of all," Moore began, "I'd like to thank y'all for all the support y'all have given the park down there.  This is basically the same budget that we've had for the last two years," he said, referring to the document he was offering for the board's approval.  "Twenty-two hundred dollars for the mowing, and then $2,200 to help pay for our umpires."  Moore said that the actual cost for the umpires would be about $2,500, but "the coaches and the league is going to take up that extra."

Moore added that "we have already gotten all the storm damage—I don't know how many of you saw the storm damage, I know David has, and George you have, most of it is in your yard—but we've already got all that fixed and we've already paid for that out of our pockets."

"Hopefully, you'll get that back," Armstrong said, then he made a motion "that we approve the Dixie Youth budget as submitted."  Dickey seconded the motion, which passed unanimously.

Bids were then opened for the mowing contract, which had been advertised after the February board meeting.  The lowest bid, for $4,200, was from Kevin Gray, and the second lowest was from Ernie Willis, for $5,040, and Armstrong made a motion to award the contract to Gray, conditioned on him having liability insurance.  "If Kevin does not have insurance, doesn't have it and doesn't want to get it, … then I think we should go ahead and award it to Willis, as he's the next lowest."  Dickey seconded the motion, which passed unanimously.

Armstrong then called on Dickey to address the next agenda item, "Key Lane repair."

"Harvey Neal Smith [of the county highway department] called me about Key Lane.  A lot of people's called the county about the road around the school, where they have to pick up their kids….  It's just chewed up, in terrible shape.  And Harvey Neal said it's a city road, he can't to anything about it.  But he said he would asphalt it and fix the road at cost and materials for us."

There then ensued some discussion about ownership of the road.  Armstrong pointed out that the state would not permit the town to spend money blacktopping the road if it was not a city street, and in the end Armstrong asked Dickey to contact Director of Education Charles Miskelly to determine whether the road belonged to the school board.

"Okay," Armstrong said, "we're going on to the next thing:  'Well pay-off and GRW payment.'  We owe, Tabitha, what?  Eight thousand and something now?"

"Eighty-five hundred on the well," Recorder Dickey replied.

"And we owe G.R.W.—"

"Five thousand," Dickey said.

"That's thirteen-five," Armstrong said, totaling the two.  "We've got a C.D. coming up for renewal, about a $45,000 C.D. coming up for renewal … the seventh of April."  Armstrong said that he had discussed the matter with the recorder, and "Before we renew this, we're thinking about taking out like fifteen grand of it, paying off G.R.W., which is the engineers from the well that we didn't do.  We've got the bunch in Jackson paid off.  We just owe G.R.W. about five more grand."

In the discussion that followed, utility director Bobby Wardlow brought up a familiar issue. "If we do that Eastview tie back in, that could be expensive, depending on what we have to do.  If we have to re-bore the road, twelve inches, that will be expensive.  To put a pipe under the road and put our pipe in it."

Finally, Summers made "a motion we pay both of these bills off and add to the well fund at each renewal as feasible."  Armstrong seconded the motion, which passed unanimously, and the meeting was adjourned on motion by Summer, seconded by Dickey.