Dwana Garrison (643-9402)            2011
    Mike Norris (632-0978)                   2009
    Jeff Browder                                     2009

Town Board Meeting

If you are a big fan of train wrecks, you should have been at the Adamsville city commission meeting July 21.

In two hours of embarrassing spectacle, Mayor Tommy Morris repeatedly and emphatically berated the commissioners for not giving the job of city recorder to Pam Young (who just happens to be his niece by marriage) and stridently (and unsuccessfully) demanded that the commissioners fire City Manager Terry Thrasher.

Morris was himself the recipient of extended scolding by Frank Lacey, the mayor’s one steady ally on the council, after which Morris returned the favor, revealing that he and Lacey, who is seeking the Republican nomination for state representative (hoping to add that office to his current collection, which includes membership on the school board, chairmanship of the school board, Adamsville commissioner, and Adamsville vice-mayor), had discussed dismissing Thrasher from his office, “but you [Lacey] wanted to wait until after the elections.”  Lacey did not dispute Morris’s assertion that the discussion had taken place, but he fell back on the quibble that he hadn’t actually used the words “after the election”—as though “December” does not come “after the [November] elections.”

(It is probably fair to say that the Lacey/Morris honeymoon is over.)

Lacey also demonstrated amazing flexibility regarding the unavoidable conflicts of interest inherent is his holding office as both an Adamsville Commissioner and a member of the McNairy County school board, abstaining from voting on one matter (paving Hughes Street), but not only voting but actually seconding a motion on another (contributing to the school system’s One to One Program).  Should he succeed in his quest for a seat in the state house of representatives, Lacey will be able to teach the old-time pols there a lesson or two …. 

Only one member of the Adamsville Town Board emerged unscathed and untarnished from the July meeting, and that was Commissioner Dwana Garrison, who had the good fortune to be absent.

A caution.  This report is l-o-o-o-n-g.  The raw transcription of what was said at the meeting—and I don’t transcribe every word, only those of note—was forty-two pages long and contained nearly 15,000 words.  The report below contains most of those words, with comments inserted to enable the reader to follow the flow of the meeting.  I have been working on this steadily since Tuesday morning, and it is now Saturday afternoon, and I would not have subjected myself to the agony of living with that two-hour meeting for nearly five days had I not believed that it was important for the people of Adamsville and McNairy County to have a full account of what transpired.  Now, if I can spend all that time and effort preparing this damned thing, the least you can do is read it.

So here is the meeting, in excruciating detail.  Hold on to your hats, because it’s a hell of a rough ride.

* * *

After the minutes of the regular 16 June meeting were approved on a motion by Jeff Browder, seconded by Mike Norris, Mayor Tommy Morris fired the first salvo of the night.  Addressing the minutes of the special called meeting of 30 June, Morris said, “it’s not legal, and I’m just not going to have anything to do with anything that’s not legal.  There’s been nothing advertised saying this was a legal meeting.  And if it was, even, a legal meeting, you discussed other items on it.  Our charter flatly says, nothing, on a so-called, special called city commission meeting, can be discussed except what is on the agenda.  And it was nothing but the budget.  It’s an illegal meeting.  I’ll let Mr., I’ll let our legal department have his say on it.”

“Well,” town attorney Ken Seaton began, “I learned, two or three days ago, in discussion with the mayor about this—June 30th meeting is what we’re talking about, right?  And it was the mayor’s position that there was no public notice for the meeting.  I spoke with Terry [city manager Terry Thrasher], I think Terry and I discussed it very briefly, and Ms Jimmie Ann [city recorder Jimmie Ann Burks], and I learned that in fact by mistake the notice didn’t get to the paper, and I’d have to agree with the mayor, that if there wasn’t proper notice, that any action that was taken at the meeting is ineffective.  I think it can be cured very—  Whatever action was taken, if the commission wants to take the action it intended to take on June 30th, that the problem can be cured by motion and a vote.  Now, this is serious business, and I know everyone involved understands it.  I think an innocent mistake was made, and there’s no reason for me to believe there was any intent on anyone’s part.  There wasn’t any intent to have a secret meeting.  I don’t know if this meeting was discussed at the June meeting.  I don’t think it was—”

“Certainly it was,” Browder said emphatically, and Norris agreed: “It sure was.”

“—and the problem is,” Seaton continued, “there just wasn’t public notice, to satisfy me.”

“Well in that—” Browder began, “I probably wouldn’t have been here.  I thought we got it in the paper.”

“No,” Burks advised, “we didn’t get it in the paper.  Remember, we posted it on the doors here, but it did not get in the paper.”

“I didn’t even realize it was posted on the doors,” Seaton said.

“No,” Mayor Morris asserted.  “I walked all the way around this place.  It was not posted on the doors.”

“Well,” Burks disagreed, “I have a copy of it here, and it come off the door.”

“Well,” Morris insisted, “I don’t care whether you’ve got a copy or not, it was not on them doors, because I walked all the way around it.  Somebody might have, a cat might have moved it or something, but it wasn’t on the door.”

“No,” Burks responded patiently, “a cat didn’t move it.”

Returning to the issue of the minutes of the 30 June meeting, Seaton said, “I think these minutes ought, and they are available, for the public to see, and these minutes summarize what discussions did take place.”

“But I think it ought be null and void,” Morris insisted.  “And if we want to have another meeting of the city commission on a special called meeting on the budget, I say let’s advertise it.  But let’s not start this— Now this has been going on for quite a bit.  I didn’t even have— The mayor, now, wasn’t even notified that you was going to have a meeting.  [Turns to Browder.]  I found it out from your son.”

“I—” Browder began, then he started over.  “We all left the regular stated meeting in June knowing it was coming.  You were there, right?”

“Yeah,” Morris acknowledged, “I was at the— But I’ve got a many a things to do besides.  This is what your people up here is supposed to do.  They’re supposed to remind you of things.”

Seaton observed that “It is in the minutes for the—”

“Oh, yeah,” Morris interrupted, “I know it’s in the minutes.”

“—for the last regular meeting, June 30th,” Seaton concluded, miscalling the actual date.

“But it was not advertised to the citizens,” Morris insisted.  Addressing the board members, he said, “You got a letter; you got a letter; he got a letter; Dwana—  But I didn’t get a letter.”

“I didn’t get a letter,” Browder said.

“Well, I was told everybody got a letter,” Morris replied.

“Nobody got a letter,” Norris asserted.

Turning to Lacey, Morris asked, “Did you get a letter, Frank?”

“No,” Lacey answered, shortly.

“You told me you did,” Morris insisted, showing the first hint of his irritation with his erstwhile ally, which was to rise steadily throughout the long meeting.

“I said I got a phone call,” Lacey insisted.

“We all got a phone call,” Norris said.

“I didn’t get one,” Morris said, in an aggrieved tone.

Browder said, “I came in to pay my water bill, is the way I found out about it.  But I knew about it before time.”

“People has got other jobs to do,” Morris said, returning to his theme.  “This is what you hire people in here to do.  Remind you of these things.  And I’ll still say y’all took action on stuff that wasn’t even supposed to be took action on.”

Seaton then attempted to get the meeting back on track. “There was a voice vote—according to these minutes.  I wasn’t here.  But there was a voice vote on the budget, and I, it’s my recommendation that the council take that back up.  There was a, looks like, a vote on a tax resolution, that action ought to be taken on.”

Browder said, “I think we should be able to take care of whatever’s got to be took care of tonight, can’t we?”

“No,” Morris insisted.  “Got to advertise them.”

Seaton disagreed. “I think you can take care of it tonight.  This meeting [referring to the meeting then underway, the 21 July meeting] was advertised,” and Norris and Browder agreed.

Lacey appeared to believe the budget issue was already resolved.  “I think the budget was taken care of.  Because it’s his budget.  He presented it.  Surely he’d be for it.  And we all agreed with it.”

“Hah!” Morris said.  “I wasn’t even here when they turned it in to y’all a second time, for the reading of it.  I didn’t know nothing about it.”

“This was,” Lacey replied, “it’s the same budget we approved at the June 16th meeting.”

“Yes,” Morris responded, “but I am supposed to report to, to present the budget.”

“I won’t argue that,” Lacey said.

“If I ain’t here,” Morris continued, “how am I going to present the budget?”  When there was no response to that question, Morris returned to his familiar theme.  “I just want you people to quit taking over, and just going to do what you want to do.”

“Maybe I may be confused,” Browder said, returning to the budget question.  “I thought the budget was presented at the first meeting, and what our quote-unquote illegal meeting was the second reading of that budget.  Was it not?”

“When you have an illegal meeting,” Morris said, “everything is null and void at an illegal meeting.  Folks, the Sunshine Law is going to kick in on you.”

“I didn’t use the word illegal,” Seaton pointed out.  “There was some notice to the public.  There was scheduled at the public meeting, at the regular monthly, June, and I, and it’s the personnel’s position here at city hall that it was posted—”

“No,” Morris insisted, “it wasn’t posted.”

“Well,” Seaton continued, “whether it was or it wasn’t, it wasn’t published in the newspaper, and I think it should have been.  I’m not saying it was an illegal meeting.  I’m saying there’s some questions about it, and it’s my recommendation that you deal with, you address these questions by bringing these, all these issues that were discussed up for discussion again tonight, and you take action on, or you don’t take action.  And I would ask that the commission concede that that’s the way to deal with it, and that whatever was addressed at that June 30th meeting ought to be addressed again.  The point is, I didn’t say it was an illegal meeting.  I don’t think that’s a word that fits the facts.”

“What’s, what is [an] illegal meeting?” Morris demanded of Seaton.  After a few moments of silence, he said, “Tell me.  You’re the, uh, you’re the legal thing.”

“An illegal meeting is an illegal meeting,” Seaton finally responded, unhelpfully.

“Well, I—” the mayor began, then he started over.  “It wasn’t advertised.  It’s not under any of these papers right here.” [Indicates some newspapers.]

“It was advertised—” Seaton began.

“Where?” Morris demanded.

“—but it was not advertised in the paper,” Seaton concluded.

“Where?” Morris repeated.  “It ain’t advertised in this paper.”

“I said it was not advertised in the paper,” Seaton repeated, with obviously strained patience.

“It wasn’t advertised on the doors,” Morris said again, “because I come up here and looked. [Pause]  Now this has been going on quite a while, and I’m, you know, I’m just—  I’m tired of it.”

After another pause, Seaton observed that “the underlying problem, is a lack of communication.  That’s one of—  You know, we had a problem a month or so ago, that involved communication.  I’m not saying whose fault it is, but that’s the problem.  In addition, there was a mistake made about getting it into the paper.  That was just an honest mistake.  I don’t think it needs to be blown out of proportion.”

“When is the end of the fiscal year?” Norris asked.  “June 30th?  Okay.  Tommy, are you not aware that we have to have two readings on this budget?”

When Morris indicated that he was aware of that fact, Norris continued. “Well, you’re the mayor, and you’re supposed to be leading us—”

“That’s right,” Morris interjected emphatically.

“—so why didn’t you—” Norris continued, “you knew it needed to be approved before June the 30th, so we could act on the budget.  Why didn’t you lead—”

“Why didn’t he [Thrasher] get it to me?” Morris complained.  “I don’t know all these figures.”

“You’re the one,” Norris began.  You’re the leader.”

“Yeah,” Morris said, sarcastically, “y’all let me lead a lot, don’t you?  Y’all go and up-serp [usurp] everything that I try to do—”

“Well,” Norris insisted, “that’s because you won’t lead.”

“I’ve led a lot more than you have, in my life,” Morris responded.  “But just like this right here.  This shouldn’t have never been discussed, on this matter.  A special called meeting is a special called meeting, and it’s stated right in the charter.  Only one thing will be—”

“Okay,” Norris interrupted, “so we’ve got an illegal meeting, here.  All we did was to do the budget, here.  Let’s approve the budget for the second reading and get on with this meeting.”

“No—” Mayor Morris insisted.

“We’re beating a dead horse,” Norris replied plaintively, and the meeting momentarily dissolved into confusion as several people spoke at once.

After several seconds, Morris said, “I’m trying to get it straight to you and him and him [indicating the three commissioners present], and Dwana ain’t here, but what needs to be done to keep this city straight?”

“Use a little common sense,” Norris responded.  “That’s what you need to do.”

“I believe I’ve used more than you do, buddy,” Morris replied.

“I don’t know,” Norris said.

At this point Burks asked Browder is he was going to make a motion, and Browder in turn asked, “Are we in a place where we can make a motion?”

“Wait a minute!” Morris objected.  “We’re not making a motion until I get through.  I’m the one that’s running, I’m the one that’s running this.  That is— You can’t take that out of that charter.  I’m the one that leads—”

“Tommy,” Browder said, resignedly, “I’m not arguing that.  All I want to do is see this meeting proceed at some point in time.”

“Let’s get on with it,” Norris agreed.

“We will proceed,” the mayor responded, “but I want to get my views across.”

“You got your views across,” Browder replied.

“No, I haven’t yet,” Morris insisted.  “I haven’t yet. Just like this tax resolution; you passed that.  That’s—”

“We discussed that at the last meeting!” Norris said.

“You cannot discuss it on a special called meeting, Mike,” Morris responded.  “You can not.  The only one item can be discussed on a special called meeting.  Isn’t that right?” he then asked Seaton.

“Well,” Seaton replied, “I think there’s, yes, there’s truth to that.  I don’t …”

“And just like this Imagination Library,” Morris continued.  “It was put in on a special called meeting.  Just like, to give $500 to—”

After some confused discussion about whether the issue had been raised at the regular meeting or the called meeting, Morris continued.  “I told Terry, I said here’s what she wants.  I said, she wants five hundred or maybe a thousand, but he said the only thing we need to give her is a hundred.  Now, didn’t you say that?”

“Five hundred,” Thrasher replied.  “I said we could stand five hundred; we couldn’t stand a thousand.”

“You told me one hundred dollars, Terry,” Morris said.  “This is what goes on between me and him.  All right, and then here’s another thing.  You started talking about the employees, hiring the employees.  That wasn’t supposed to be talked about at the special called meeting.”  After a long pause, Morris turned to Seaton and asked, “Was it?”

“I agree with you, mayor,” Seaton said.  “The special called meeting was on June 30th for the second reading of the budget.  And, to be run in the paper.  And these other things shouldn’t be discussed.  It’s just that simple.  I think you’ve made your point.”

“It don’t do no good,” Morris said, continuing his plaint.  “They go right ahead and do it even after that.  I’m wanting some action from it, some way.  I’m tired of it.  They need to go by this charter right here, is what they need to do…. What do we need to do now?  Is there any way that these people can be reprimanded?”

“I think they’ve been adequately reprimanded,” Seaton responded.  “Maybe more than adequately, Mayor.  I think you’re making— There may be a lot of issues, and a lot of problems, but I think enough has been said about this.  There wasn’t any intent.  Everybody was together.  Some things come up, and relatively minor things were discussed at that meeting.  I think everybody needs to learn from it; I’m sure everybody has.  And the next time there’s a special meeting to discuss a budget, I think everybody will remember that the discussion needs to be limited to what the meeting is called for.”

“Every time I’ve every called for one,” Morris continued, undeterred, “or anybody’s called for one, when I’m here, I say only thing can be discussed is this particular item.  But no, they didn’t even send me a, call me, do nothing, send me a notice that they was going to have a meeting.  That’s what tees me off so bad.  They’re just, really, trying to make me look bad.  But I’m not approving, myself, this meeting, minutes.  The special called meeting.”

“But can we as a committee approve these minutes?” Norris asked.

“I don’t see how you can,” Morris responded.

Norris then asked Seaton, “Can we, Mr. Attorney?”

“What I’d ask you to do,” Seaton responded, “somebody make a motion to accept what I’ve said about this, and—”

“Which was?” Norris asked.

Seaton replied, “Which was that there’s problems with the meeting, and all actions the committee, the commission took at the meeting should be ineffective, and—”

“We can handle this under old business, can we not?” Browder asked.

“Any time you want to,” Seaton said, “as far as I’m concerned in this meeting—”

“What do you want us to do?” Norris asked.  “To take this out, and then vote on it again?”

“Open it up—” Seaton replied.  “Open each issue up for discussion, and discuss it, and vote on it if you want to.  But I think, I guess, I feel like there needs to be a motion and a second and a vote to accept what I’m saying.  And declare that any action taken by the commission at that June 30th meeting is ineffective.”

“I move we accept Mr. Seaton’s recommendation,” Browder said.  “Handle the business at this meeting.”

Norris seconded the motion, and then Mayor Morris asked, “Now, this is to kick it out, and start all over?”

“That’s one way to put it.” Seaton replied.  “It’s to find that what happened at that meeting was not effective.”

Mayor Morris called the question, and the motion passed by a unanimous vote.

Norris then said, “I would like to make another motion that we enter into discussion about the second reading on the budget for 2008-2009, to approve it.”

“Well, Mike,” Browder said, in an effort to get back to the agenda, “why don’t we just follow the regular order of business here on the agenda.  I mean, that’s, you know, we’re going to handle that, that’ll be old business.  The budget is old business.  The tax, and Imagination Library.”

“Okay,” Norris agreed.

“What I see there, though,” Mayor Morris said, “I know y’all are not going to agree with this, but that should be advertised for another meeting.”

Browder asked, incredulously, “We can’t approve our budget on a second reading at a regular stated meeting—”

“It wasn’t advertised,” Morris interrupted.

“It doesn’t have to be advertised,” Norris asserted.

“Well, it does—” Morris insisted.

“I think budget meetings have to be,” Lacey opined, “you have to advertise that you’re talking about.”

“What about it, Ken?” Browder asked Seaton.

“It’s not our budget,” Lacey said, before Seaton could answer.  “It’s the mayor’s budget,  He’s the one—”

“I think you can take action on it right now,” Seaton said, responding to Browder’s question, “but I don’t know where you get—”

“The budget has to be printed in the newspaper, in its entirety,” Thrasher interjected, “with the 501-c-3 expenditures.  Now, whether you can vote on it tonight and run it in the paper next week, I can’t answer that.”

“No,” Seaton said, with unhelpful ambiguity.

“Has to be run in the paper twice?” Browder asked.

“No,” Burks responded, “it’s already been run in the paper.”

“Just once,” Thrasher said, also responding to Browder’s question.

“It’s been run though—” Norris began, only to be interrupted by Browder, who asked, “Well, is it one or two times?”

“Two times to begin with,” Morris insisted.

“One time,” Burks said.  “And you run it in the paper one time.”

Thrasher, attempting to bring this “Who’s on First?” routine to an end, said succinctly, “Meet, vote on it, and run it in the paper, and then meet and vote on it.”

“This will be the second reading,” Burks observed.  “They already voted the first time.”

“Right,” Thrasher agreed.  “Did the budget make the paper?”

“Yes,” Burks replied.

“Okay,” Thrasher said, as though that settled it.

But Mayor Morris thought otherwise. “The first budget did—”

“It’s the same budget,” Thrasher interjected.

“—but the second budget didn’t,” Morris continued.  “The second reading of the budget did not make the paper.  I’ve got the papers.”

“No,” Burks explained, “the budget was printed in the paper.  And all y’all need to do is the second reading on the budget.”

“But it’s got to be advertised,” Morris continued to insist.  “To let the people know, that their—”

“Is there a problem with waiting,” Seaton finally asked, “if the mayor thinks it needs to be advertised?”

“What’s the problem with waiting?” Morris demanded.  “We’ve been here a hundred and something years.”

Burks explained that “You have to pass a resolution to operate on the old budget if you’re going to—”

“Is that the only problem?” Seaton asked, and Thrasher answered, “Yeah.”

Terry: “Yeah.”

“—if you’re going to wait,” Burks concluded.

“It’s no problem,” Thrasher repeated, “You can do that, and do it at next month’s meeting, if you want to.”

“That’s fine with me,” Morris said.

“But,” Thrasher added, “you need to get a motion to operate under the 2007-2008 budget until the August meeting.”

Browder then made a motion to that effect, which Norris seconded.  In the vote that followed, Lacey and Norris voted no, while the mayor and Browder voted yes.  After Morris announced that the motion failed, Norris said that he had changed his mind, but when Morris asked what he had changed it to, Norris replied “No,” which was in fact the way he had originally voted.

“Well,” Morris asked, apparently rhetorically, “what are you going to do?”

“We shall see,” Norris responded, cryptically.  “We shall see.”

It was at this point that the normally supportive Lacey, who has been Morris’s protégé ever since taking office in January, took his first nip at the hand that fed him. “I think,” Lacey said, “I think it’s time for you, Mayor, to run the city, and it’s your dad-gummed budget and I don’t understand why you have a problem with us approving your budget.  We’ve already approved it once.  I don’t understand why you would cost us more money, more time.  If you want, this is what you wanted, so, I mean, it’s your budget.  I’m ready to approve it.”

“Frank,” Morris replied, “I wasn’t even invited at my budget hearing.”

“You didn’t have to be invited,” Norris observed.

“I sure did,” Morris insisted.  “They didn’t tell me about it.”

“I’m not, you know, all that’s water under the bridge,” Lacey said.  “We have a city to run, and we’re not acting very—”

“If y’all would quit acting like kids,” Morris interrupted, “we could run it.”

“I’m ready to approve a budget,” Lacey said, impatiently.  “And we can do it legally, so I don’t see why we don’t do it.  I make a motion that we approve the budget on second reading.”

“Absolutely,” Browder said, emphatically.

“Was that a second?” Thrasher asked, but before Browder could respond, Norris said, “I’ll second.”

“Can he do that?” Morris asked, turning to Seaton.

“He can make that motion,” Seaton replied, “y’all can vote on it, and if I see a problem with it I’ll make a report to that effect and we’ll have to call a special meeting and do something.  I don’t know what we’ll do.”

“I think it would be dangerous to call a special meeting,” Lacey said, and the other two commissioners agreed.

“I ain’t coming to no more special meetings.” Browder said.

“Well,” Norris said, “neither am I.”

“That’s it,” Browder added.

“I mean,” Norris said, “this is ridiculous.”

After some crosstalk, Seaton regained the floor. “The question I asked a while ago was, is it a problem, is there expense, is it an issue to just operate under this old budget until next month?  The answer I got was, there way no problem, and it seems to me like the best solution would be pass the motion Jeff made—”

Lacey interrupted. “There is an expense, and there’s no reason—”

“Well,” Seaton replied, “I was told there wasn’t.  If there is, what is it?”

“It would be the advertising expense,” Lacey answered.

“Frank,” Morris said, playing down the significance, “we’ve operated on the old budget through November.”

“You’re right,” Lacey agreed, “and I have done it—”

Norris interrupted to say, “We shouldn’t be doing that.”

Lacey then resumed his criticism of the mayor.  “I’ve done everything I know, for the benefit of this city, and for you, and many times been the only one here to support you, and I don’t understand why in the world you’re trying to accuse me of violating anything.  And I’m not the one that didn’t didn’t notify you, I’m not the one that, I didn’t do any of this, but yet, by golly, you’re willing to persecute me with everybody else, and I haven’t done anything wrong, Tommy.  Not a dad-gummed thing, and this is a good budget, and you presented it the first time.  I don’t know why you weren’t included the second vote, but we need to vote on it and get on with business.  We have a city to run.  We’ve got a whole bunch of other things to go over, here, and we still haven’t accomplished many other things that we said we were going to do in earlier meetings.  This happens about, seems like about every two years.  This is just that time that we have to work through it.”

“Well,” Morris said, “I still say I didn’t present the second reading of the budget, and I’m not going to stand behind it.  Especially, they raised taxes and everything else on it.”

“Nobody’s raised taxes,” Lacey stated.

“They put the tax in there—” Morris began, only to be cut off by his erstwhile ally.

“It’s the exact same budget,” Lacey said.  “On June 16, this [the minutes] says, ‘Mayor Morris says that he thought this was a good budget.’  It’s the exact same budget.”

“All right,” Morris said, “but this was voted on on this meeting [the 30 June meeting].  This was even voted on to give the museum curator $11 an hour, which shouldn’t have never even been in there.”

“You know,” Lacey said with rising impatience, “the money’s already there.  It’s got nothing to do with this meeting.  They can do with their money what they want to do with it.”

Morris persisted. “But it shouldn’t even been brought up, is what I’m saying, Frank.  It shouldn’t even have been brought up.”

“It was a budget issue,” Lacey said.  “It can be discussed.”

“The only thing you ought to have done at that budget meeting,” Morris continued, “if you’d have had me where I knew I was invited to them things, all you’d have had to done was up or down the budget.  But no, y’all says, ‘We’ll do it without Morris.’”

“No,” Lacey replied with evident annoyance, “’Y’all’ didn’t say that.  ‘Y’all’ didn’t say that.  We asked— No one knew where you were—”

At this point Browder reentered the fray. “Well, now, as far as all the notification goes, nobody notifies me it’s time to go to work in the morning.  The meeting was talked about in the regular stated meeting when the budget was presented.”

Norris agreed. “We knew we were going to have a second reading, and the end of the fiscal years was June the 30th.  Everybody agreed that we wanted to have the second reading before June the 30th.”

“I’ll be the first one to admit,” Browder said, “that June 30th meeting was not in the paper.  I was under the impression that it had been in the paper.  I guess maybe I’m at fault for not looking through the paper and seeing it, and I think we’ve already taken care of that issue.  I don’t know why we can’t go forward with our budget from this point.”

“Let’s get back to your issue that you know to go to work,” Morris said, referring to Browder’s remark a few moments earlier.  “You know you’ll get fired if you don’t go to work, so—”

Browder’s response matched the mayor’s tone: “I guess the only difference in that is, and this is, they ain’t going to fire you, right?”

“Well, they will, someday,” Morris replied, “if you don’t do your job, and you don’t show up for work.”

“We had a motion—” Browder began, wearily.

“Let’s get this over with—” the mayor began, only to be interrupted by a “Hallelujah!” from Browder.

“—what are we going to do?” Morris continued.  “You, somebody made a motion or something.  I’m tired of fooling with y’all.”

Lacey responded, “The motion on the table to approve the budget, and the second reading, as presented, like it was in the first meeting.”

“I’ll second the motion,” Norris said, and Mayor Morris called the question, but when Thrasher began to call the roll, Morris objected.

“Wait a minute,” he said

“I thought you questioned the motion [that is, called for a vote],” Thrasher said.

“I’m fixing to talk,” Morris said.

“Oh,” Thrasher responded.  “Okay.”

But Lacey said, “You called the question.  That means no more discussion.”

“Boy,” Morris responded, “you getting technical in your old age, ain’t you?”

“No,” Lacey replied, explaining that he was merely stating the rules.

Morris then had his say. “The only thing I’ve got to say about this, I still say it’s wrong, I need to hammer to y’all people you cannot do just what you want to do.  So now you can have your vote.”

The motion carried, with Morris casting the only no vote, after which Morris muttered, “Motion passed on conditions.  Seaton is going to see if there’s any wrongdoing.”

* * *

Morris then turned to the agenda and read, “’Reports.  Financial.’  By somebody I don’t know who is—”  In fact, the next word on that line of the agenda was “Thrasher.”

Lacey interrupted the mayor in mid-sentence: “I make a motion we approve the financial report.”

“All of them?” Morris asked.

“The financial report,” Lacey repeated.  “It has to be done separate.”

Browder seconded the motion, but before the vote could be taken Morris said, “I’ve got a question about it.  On this— I may be wrong, looking at this, though.  Last year, I’m looking right here, as of 2007-08, as of 6/30 of ‘08, is this the last year, here?  We’ve got some that’s run way over.”  There then followed some discussion during which Mayor questioned individual line items that have run over, and Thrasher and other city employees tried to explain to him that it’s the totals that count and not the individual items.  When the mayor finally ran out of questions the financial report passed by a unanimous vote.

Lacey then made a motion, which was seconded by Norris, that the remain reports be approved, which was done by a unanimous vote after some discussion.

Mayor Morris then moved on to old business, beginning with MuniGas.

“Well,” Seaton observed, “not a lot has changed,” and indeed nothing emerged in the ensuing twelve minutes of discussion to contradict that observation.  Perhaps the most significant item of information to emerge was Seaton’s own acknowledgement of the complexity of the MuniGas contract: “The issue is,” the town attorney said, “this contract is so long and complicated, and I, if you guys want to spend, I don’t know, probably a couple thousand dollars having one of these Bass [unintelligible], some lawyer like that, take a look at this, and I’m sure they’re going to say it’s fine.  But I don’t know.  I’m sorry to put y’all in the position I’m putting you in about this, but I just don’t feel comfortable telling you that I understand the contract and that I’m okay with it.  I wouldn’t have one problem with y’all relying on the good reports you’ve had regarding these folks, in moving forward.  You just, I think, need to make a decision, do you want to spend some money to get an expert take a look at it, or do you want to go ahead and make a deal.  Or not make a deal.  Let me say one more thing, Mayor.  I hope, and is guess this is wishful thinking on my part, but I could talk to a lawyer that had already looked at this, and knew what they were doing, and given a good opinion about it.  I did talk to one lawyer that works for TVA, and of course she finally said, again, ‘I look at this from TVA’s point of view, and I’m not going to give you anything you can rely on.’ …  I can understand where she was coming from, and where probably every other lawyer I talk to would about be coming from.”

The rest was largely a rehash of information covered at earlier meetings, and the discussion ended with no action being taken.

The next few items were disposed of more quickly.  Thrasher reported, regarding the Downtown Project, that “all the deeds have been signed and registered and it’s all in TDOT’s hands.  It’s been sent to TDOT, we’re waiting on them to take action.”

Norris added that he had “talked to Bart a week or so ago and tried to get some sort of time frame, and if everything goes right we’re looking at probably the middle of September, something like that, maybe to put a shovel in the sand.”

Police Chief Bill McCall reported on the “Speed Cameras” situation. “Got in touch with Redflex the next day after y’all asked me to look into the matter of getting a couple of speeding cameras, or the possibility of it.  And I did.  Got a letter back from him by fax, thanking us for our interest in it.  It’s not going to be a quick thing, I can tell you that.  It’s going to be pretty prolonged, because they have problems with populations under ten thousand, because of the expense of installing these systems.  But he says that don’t mean it can’t be done.  Get me some data.  So I’m supplying him with the necessary data.”

The town’s “Vision/Mission Statement” was tabled without significant discussion, then, Thrasher reported on the last item of old business, which was listed, somewhat confusingly, as “New Businesses.”

“We’ve got,” Thrasher began, “if you’re not aware of it, a company called Pickwick Express has rented the eastern part of the Quick-Mart building, and he’s got out a little blurb.  I think his first edition is September the 1st.  It’s going to be a website, free advertising for individuals, business advertising for businesses, and, I don’t know.  It’s just a small business.  I thought y’all would want to know about it.”

“We’ve got a client looking for one acre, up to two acres of land on 64 highway for a retail business.  That’s as far as we’ve gotten with him.  We’ve sent him whatever we know of the property that’s available.  He hasn’t come down and talked to anymore, so there’s a possibility of a retail business coming somewhere on 64.

“And this gentleman called me again today, and he will borrow our conference room one upcoming Saturday, and will be interviewing potential employees for a sewing factory to go in the Garan Building.”

“That’s for sure going to happen?” Norris asked.

“Well,” Thrasher responded, “a lot will depend on how many people he gets, that’s ready to go to work.  He’s really sweating the fact that he will not be able to get enough labor.  That’s why he’s going to use the conference room, and talk to people.”

“How many you need?” Norris asked.

“Thirty,” Thrasher replied.  “Minimum.”

“That’s the reason they left the first time,” Mayor Morris observed, “on account of couldn’t get no labor.”

Browder asked, “How big of a portion of that building is he planning on getting, Terry, has he said?  Do you know?”

“About twenty or thirty thousand square feet,” Thrasher said.  “Basically, where L&A, or L&S Sales, the part they were in.”

At this point Mayor Morris addressed two men in the audience, asking “Who are y’all with?”

“Hart, Freeland and Roberts,” one of them responded.

“Hart, Freeland and Roberts,” Morris repeated.  “You’re not on the agenda, are you?”

“No,” the man acknowledged.

Morris asked the commissioners if  they wanted “to listen to them talk” before the board continued with the regular agenda, and when the board agreed to do so the man who had spoken rose to his feet.

“I’m Allan Pettigo, with Hart, Freeland and Roberts, and this is Kyle Dunn.  And we responded to a letter for proposals, request for proposals on a water and sewer study, and so we’ve got, I’ve got the water proposal in my hand.  He’s got the sewer.  And basically it’s just to take a look at the system, see where it stands, what the current state, and then how it might be improved.  We’ve got cost numbers in there with a table showing the labor hours involved.  We tried to look at it from the standpoint of what’s affordable.  You can study things to death, or you can have somebody that has objective eyes kind of look at it and make their determination and then write down their findings and then send it to you, and then you’ve got something you can look at and build on, as far as a plan, to go ahead with any changes you need to make.  So, we can go into it in depth, or just leave it here to read at your leisure, but we’ve got seven copies that we can leave for you.”

“Why don’t you just leave it?” Morris said.  “We’re ‘in depth,’ I think, tonight.”

* * *

Pettigo and Dunn then took their leave, and Mayor Morris proceeded on to the “New Business” portion of the agenda, skipping over the first two items without comment.  Those two items, which he would come back to later in the meeting, were:

(A) Dismissal - Terry Thrasher; and

(B) Illegal Meetings

Item (C) under new business was “Imagination Library,” but as Marge Blassingame was not there to make the presentation the board at first decided to put it off to the following month, only to have it reemerge a few minutes later.

Item (D) was “Close APD Drug Fund,” and Burks reported that “we’ve been told by the auditors we could close that little fund.  We don’t collect drug money anymore.  They do that through the county drug task force, so we won’t be getting any money to add to it, and we just about spent it all.  And we took part of it out to go on one of Bill’s cars, and part of it to outfit those cars.  So they had made a recommendation last year that we might want to close it out, but y’all have to vote to close it.”

“How much is in there?” Morris asked.

“Oh, right now there’s about $2,000,” Burks said.  “We’ll just put it back in the general fund and police fund.”

Lacey made a motion to close the account, which was seconded by Norris and passed by a unanimous roll call vote.

“Can we back up one step to Imagination Library?” Browder then asked, and when Mayor Morris asked what it was the board spent some time discussing the program, which provides books to children at an early age to encourage them to read.

“Ms Blassingame, she said they needed more money,” Norris remarked.  “I don’t know why, but the reason this was going to be brought up is because Adamsville, not just McNairy County, but Adamsville is the lowest on the totem pole as far as participation in this program in the entire state.  And they need some help.  I was going to suggest, and I should have done, but closing out this drug fund?  When you put that back in the general fund I’d suggest that we earmark that for this Imagination fund, because they need the money.”

Browder was thinking along the same lines. “Well, of course, we already talked about $500 to that.  If we were going to do something with that kind— If we’re able, if we feel comfortable in doing something with that drug fund money, I would like to see it increase our Imagination Library contribution to a thousand, and the rest of that money go to the One to One program, at the school.  I don’t think, you know, that program just getting of the ground.  Commissioner Lacey had stated that the county’s not funding that this year, and I don’t think we realize, and won’t realize for a few years to come, how important that program is to our kids.  If we can do something as a town to help our children, I think we need to do that, and it appears to me that we’ve got the money to do that right now.”

Seaton asked whether there weren’t “rules about how that [drug fund] money can be spent,” and Burks confirmed that “it will go back into general fund the police department funds.”

Mayor Morris also asked for an explanation of the One to One program, which Browder had mentioned, and Browder provided it.

“Bottom line,” Thrasher said, “McNairy County school system One on One [sic] program.  We put a thousand in there.”

“Already?” Morris asked.

“Yeah,” Thrasher replied.

“And they’re asking for more?” Morris asked in apparent disbelief.

“Well, no,” Lacey said.  “I’m asking for more.  Selmer doubled theirs, because the county cut their funding.  I thought we do, double ours, to two thousand this year to help out also.  But both of these programs are the difference in a future generation or— Well, that, that, understands and knows, I mean, the Imagination Library, if kids don’t learn to read, what, we know the struggles, and then, are graduating high school now without the ability to properly use a computer, you’re one step behind, already.”

“Further than that,” Browder agreed, meaning further than one step behind.

Norris then moved that donations to both programs be doubled—Imagination Library from $500 to $1,000, and One to One from $1,000 to $2,000—and his motion was seconded by School Board Member and Chairman Frank Lacey, who also participated in the unanimous vote to provide those moneys to the school system.

“Barge Waggoner” was the next item on the agenda, and Mayor Morris called on Barge Waggoner’s representative, Shannon Cotter, for a report.

“I had called up here and talked with P.W. [Paul Wallace Plunk, of the utility department].  We try to keep our clients informed of what’s going on, and how costs are affecting various projects.  Y’all, where you’ve gotten elevated storage tank.  We have contacted some contractors about steel prices and delivery times, so we can kind of estimate where we’re going to be in y’all’s project.  [Unintelligible name] is estimating that construction costs for steel tanks only are probably 50% higher than what they were this time last year.  They estimated a 250,000 gallon elevated tank would be at four hundred thousand.  That’s not taking all the little extra things that you have to hook up to it, the water to it, and all that.  We’re just talking about steel members only.  So he’s estimating it could be, by bid time, $600,000.  Now, that’s one potential bidder.  That’s not saying what it’s going to be.  We don’t know.  I don’t want y’all to be blind-sided by any of this, when we do take bids.  And they’re also saying you’re looking at a minimum of 300 days delivery time on the steel for elevated tanks.  Which may work to your advantage, sitting here discussing your budget as it is.  Which means you may not have to complete all your funds this fiscal year.  You may not be able to disburse them [unintelligible word or two] next year.  I wanted to come just to inform you of where you are in the project.  The plans and specifications are ready.  We’re waiting on y’all to get your contract.  Jimmie Ann, I don’t think you’ve received that yet, have you?  As soon as you get that, I believe your environmental has been submitted by the development district and has cleared that portion of it, once you get the contract.  We’ve requested the wage rate.  The designer portion will be submitted on your behalf to the state, so y’all can get permission to advertise the contract for execution.  That’s for your information, just to keep you informed, and I’ll be glad to answer any questions you might have.”

“Well, can I ask you one thing?” Morris asked, mounting a familiar hobby-horse.  “You know, you’re saying about an elevated tank.  Ain’t a ground-level tank cheaper?”

“I’ll discuss that with engineering and get you an answer on that, Mayor Morris,” Cotter replied.  “I’m not qualified to answer that.”

“I know the maintenance on it would be a lot cheaper,” Morris continued.

“I will ask that question—” Cotter began.

“But what we’re after now is storage, anyway,” Morris said.

“We have in there [i.e., in the report] you need 250,000.  That gets you to what the state is going to require, with a little bit of wiggle room for growth.  Not a whole lot of wiggle room for growth, but a small amount for growth.”

“But if we’re going to go, don’t get the little wiggle,” Morris said.  “Put a big one in there.  You know, get you a big-sized tank, and you’re through with it for a while.”

“I will ask that question and let you know tomorrow morning,” Cotter replied.

The next item on the agenda was the appointment of a member to the board of zoning appeals.

Thrasher explained that “Mr. Gene Ruth has moved out of town, was serving on the board of zoning appeals.  We need to take somebody to take his place.  I contacted a few names, just because they were handy.  Gary Henline says he would serve.  Roger McClain said he would serve.  And Commissioner Garrison contacted me and said that she would serve.  That’s all the names I’ve got.”

Morris questioned whether a commissioner could serve on that board, and Thrasher replied that “We’ve never had one, and I’ve got a call through to MTAS.  I think that the board does not serve on that because this is the final say-so, the board of zoning appeals, and I don’t think they wanted to get politics involved.”

After a brief discussion Lacey nominated Roger McClain, and the motion, seconded by Browder, passed by a unanimous voice vote.

The next item was the appointment of a member to the industrial development board.

Thrasher explained that “Mrs. Garrison has offered to serve, Tommy Ross has agreed to serve, Roger McClain—no, y’all have—Roger McClain has said he’ll serve, and Gary Henline will serve.  So you’ve got—”

Referring to Commissioner Garrison’s capacity to serve, Morris said,  “I still don’t believe that, on the industrial board, that, that—”

He was abruptly interrupted by Lacey, who said, “I make a motion Tommy Ross.”

Browder questioned whether the commission actually appointed a member or merely submitted names for consideration. 

“These names,” Thrasher replied, “you need to really send more than one name, because the way it’s structured we’re to send three names, and the county commission names the appointee.  Y’all just suggest.  They’re not on the board until the county commission votes them.  So you might pick you out two or three of these names.”

“I’ll make a motion Tommy Ross and Gary Henline’s names be sent,” Lacey said, and Browder seconded his motion.  Oddly, Mayor Morris move immediately to the next agenda item and no vote was taken on the motion.

That next item was the paving of Hughes Street, which may just have made its farewell appearance on the Adamsville City Commission agenda.

“This thing keeps coming up,” Thrasher began, “about blacktopping Hughes Street.  And the last, well not last, several minutes [sic—means to say “meeting”] ago, this city commission voted to split the cost of blacktopping Hughes Street if the school board or county would give us a five-year lease on the property.  And that’s basically what we’ve tried to word in there.  And according to Charlie Miskelly—  Frank, would you be the one to sign that, or does he sign it, or how would that work?  You’re chairman of the— “

“Probably me, I guess,” Lacey responded.

“I’ve got problems with that,” Mayor Morris interjected.  “Y’all already know it.  We are in a push, or bind, to blacktop the roads out on our streets.  Some of them are in bad shape.  Blacktop’s go to sixty, eighty dollars a ton, and if you do that for the county out there, and— It’s just going to make it a lot faster job.  People go through there faster.  Right now, they’ll go slower, because it’s not like a highway.  But we need it on our streets.  I don’t know what you’re talking about now, in price, now.  The last price we got, I figure, was what, twelve or fifteen thousand?”

“Somewhere in that neighborhood,” Thrasher agreed.

“All right,” Morris continued.  “It’s went up since then.  So, you’re looking at a lot of money.  And the school board gets twenty-five million dollars, right at it.  Am I right, Frank?”

“Twenty-two,” Lace replied.

“Twenty-two,” Morris repeated.  “And we try to work off a budget of five, five-and-a-half million, and it’s—”

“Which is about what we get from the county,” Lacey interjected.

“What, five-and-a-half million?” Morris asked.  “Somebody out here, you know, are people that ride these streets, they’re going to have to do without, if we do that.  Y’all need to check in on that asphalt.  It is high, now, and it don’t go very far.  That’s all I’m going to say about it.”

“Refreshing my memory a little,” Browder observed, “it’s been several months ago when we dealt with this the last time, we were the one that approached the school board with this idea, were we not?  My personal opinion is, since we were the one that approached the school board, and the school board has come back affirmative, I think we need to live up to our original agreement.”

“Well, you got a good idea there,” Morris agreed, “but, you know, asphalt was a third, back then, what it is now.  If they had waited another year, it would have been triple.  But I’m just telling you somebody, some roads, some places, might even be in front of your house, Jeff, are going to have to be not patched, if we do this.”

“I understand that,” Browder replied.  “That road’s traveled, that all I can say.”

“Yeah,” Morris responded, “but it’s not supposed to be traveled fast.”

“Well,” Norris said, joining the discussion, “that’s the reason you should have your police there, patrolling.  And I think any streets that are involved in the transportation of your children to and from school are of utmost importance.”

“We do that, other streets,” Morris began, and then he dropped it.  “But— Let’s vote on it.  Get it over with.  Do I hear a motion?”

Browder made the motion, which was seconded by Norris.  In the vote that followed, Browder and Norris voted yes, Morris voted no, and Lacey, who had minutes earlier seen no conflict in advocating, seconding, and voting for the expenditure of Adamsville moneys on the McNairy County schools, abstained.

Morris, taking the position that the motion had failed, moved immediately to the next agenda item, “Sale of City Stuff - Garan Building (7-26-08).”

“All the equipment that was left in there by L&A Sales,” Thrasher explained, “was sold to two men.  These two men want to have a one-time auction sale at the building, and they’re going to clean all of that out, bring in some other merchandise.  It will be a one day, Saturday thing only.  I think they’ve been in contact with Mr. Lacey about selling any of the bank furnishings that he hasn’t already sold.  And they told the city it won’t cost us anything to sell any of the stuff we want to put in there.  Old scrap lawnmowers, just anything that we’ve got that we can haul down there and line up in front of the building.  They’re going to charge a buyer’s premium, and that’ll pay them their fee, and we get what the merchandise brings.  So I just want to know if y’all want to—”

Browder interrupted Thrasher and harkened back to the just-complete vote. “I was just confused.  We had two vote yes, one no vote, and one didn’t vote.  Is a not, is an abstention from voting the same as a no vote?”

“Law of the majority,” Morris proclaimed, unhelpfully.

Seaton observed that two votes was a majority, but Morris insisted otherwise.  “Not when you got a commissioner [Garrison] not here.  And he [Lacey] abstained.”

“I didn’t know it was an issue,” Seaton said, “but two to one’s a majority.  I don’t understand where you’re coming from, Mayor.”

“Two— they’s four people here,” Morris said, arguing that two votes does not constitute a “majority” of four votes. “You got two votes for—”

“An abstain is not a no vote,” Seaton explained.

“Well, what is it?” Morris demanded.

Seaton replied, “It’s a ‘not vote.’  Abstain—”

“An abstain is a no vote,” Morris insisted.

“No, it’s not—” Seaton began.

“What’s ‘pass’?” the mayor asked, switching tacks.

“What?” a bewildered Seaton responded.

“Is ‘pass’ a no vote?” Morris asked

“Pass is not a vote,” Seaton replied.

 “Pass is a no vote,” Morris insisted.

“Not in my opinion,” Seaton said.

“Well—” Morris began, chuckling.

Seaton tried again.  “Frank feels like he needs to abstain because of his relationship with the school board, and I agree with him—”

“I agree with him, too,” Morris agreed.

“—but,” Seaton continued, “we had two votes in favor of the motion and one vote against the motion, and the motion passed.”

Morris continued to insist that two votes did not constitute a majority of the four people present.

“If Frank would have voted no,” a weary Seaton explained again, “it would have been a tie vote.”

“Well,” Morris said, dismissively, “y’all do what you want to.  You’re going to anyway.”

“So it passed?” asked the Independent-Appeal’s Tom Evans, from the audience.  “Are we paving the street?”

“We’re paving the street,” Norris replied.

“But,” Morris added, returning to his argument that paving Hughes Street meant neglecting others, “no, some of the streets out in the town, we’re not.”

Before that dead horse was finally laid to rest, Mayor Morris recognized Willie Jones in the audience, who asked “why don’t you put some speed bumps” on Hughes Street to reduce the speeding.  Morris replied that, “legally, you can’t put speed bumps on a road that’s a through road.”  In the brief crosstalk that followed City Attorney Seaton, referring to the mayor’s just-uttered legal opinion, said, “I don’t know if that’s right or not.”

Dismissal Fracas

“Next business,” Morris then intoned, returning to what was in fact the first item of New Business on the printed agenda. “’Dismissal - Terry Thrasher. Morris.’  It’s come to a boiling point, that I cannot work with Terry any more.  This has been going on for six and a half years, and no matter what I bring up, he’s against, or he gets mad if I bring it up.  And it goes back to not informing me about meetings, and when I come up here to the city hall to talk to him, sometimes I’ll be talking to him, he’ll just leave.  And I’ll say, ‘Don’t leave.’  So this has been going on six and a half years, and when it come down to this last deal with y’all sending the charter up to Jackson, up to Memphis, without my signature on it, and me not knowing the first thing about it.  He didn’t tell me.  He didn’t even tell me it was up there, until I found out about it in Nashville.  And y’all want to know who had it stopped?  I stopped it.  I got some friends up there.  But this is the only thing.  It’s just constantly back-stabbing me continuously with him.  You can go in there to talk to him, and I’ve told him to shut off his cell phone.  Well, about the time I get in there the telephone will ring, and I’ll tell him to shut it off.  Well, he’ll get mad about that.  I’ve told him to shut off his buzzer, and he’ll jump up and run out.  Well, come to find out, most times there ain’t nothing he went to.  He just didn’t want to talk to me.  And then, on this last deal of hiring— And I could go on and on and on about the things that we discussed, or haven’t discussed because he’ll just take off and leave.  And this last deal of hiring somebody for the office up here, that is not this commission’s, to hire just regular people.  Your job is to hire the people like Terry, heads of the departments.  But I went in there, and I had told them to pick out the top— I picked out the top ten, of the applications, and I said, ‘Now y’all go through this top ten and give me three.’  Well, that’s what they done.  So I picked out, Pam Young was in it.  I picked out Pam Young, because her qualification is just as good as anybody else’s.  And as far as her work schedule, she ain’t had but four jobs in her life, so I’d say she’s stayed with a job.  But he says, ‘I’m not going to hire her.’  I says, ‘Why?’  ‘They don’t want me to.’  I said, “Well, who’s they?’  ‘They.’  I said, ‘Who is they?’  He said, ‘The commissioners.’  Well, before I came to talk to him, on a Friday night—or Friday evening.  Or Thursday.  I talk to Frank.  Frank said, ‘Tommy, you need to hire somebody.’  I said, ‘All right.’  I talked to Teddy.  He said, ‘You need to hire somebody.’   I said, ‘I’ll let—[pause, while the tape is changed]  So I said, ‘I’ll let you know Friday morning.’  Didn’t I tell you this?  So, when I— I mean Monday morning.  And I come in here Monday and I said, “I want Pam Young hired.’  And I had talked with Debbie.  Debbie said she could work with her well.  And I told him to hire her.  Well, Tuesday I come in here and found out that I wasn’t even invited to the budget commission meeting.  And I said, ‘Terry, did you call’— You can shake your head all you want to.  I said ‘Terry, did you call Pam?’  He said, ‘No.  Not going to hire her.  They don’t want me to.  They don’t want me to.’  And that’s when I says, ‘Okay.’  I said— He said—  And when I asked him, I said, ‘What about not telling me about the planning, I mean the budget, Terry?’  ‘Well, you ought to know about it.  It was in the minutes.’  I said, ‘Terry, I’ve got other things to do besides looking after your job all the time.’  So, I says, ‘As far as I’m concerned, you’re fired.’  And as far as I’m concerned he’s still fired.  I don’t know who’s told him to come back.  I guess y’all did.  But everything I do up here, see, y’all up-surping [sic: usurping] me.

“Now Frank, his own self, told me to hire somebody,” Morris said, finally bringing his monologue of more than four minutes to a close.  “Didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Lacey acknowledged.  “And Pam wasn’t in the three.”  [“Pam” being the mayor’s niece by marriage, Pam Young.]

“She was in the top three.”

“No, she wasn’t,” Lacey replied.  “No, sir.  She was not in the top three, and we even discussed the fact that we need to hire someone that had the resume, without prejudice, and when you told—when I told you that on Friday, ‘You need to hire somebody,” I believe I said, that’s qualified to do the job by the qualifications that we had mentioned, and I assumed you was going to make the best decision.  Now, I didn’t know which ones you would consider, but there were three resumes there.  One of them turned the job down.  One of them lives in Savannah and you didn’t want to hire her.  And the other, that left the other girl, and then you brought in this other one, and—”

“No,” Morris interrupted, “Pam was always in the top ten, because she—”

“She might have been in the top ten—” Lacey began.

“She wasn’t in our top three,” Thrasher interjected.

“She was in the top ten,” Morris repeated.

“She might have been in the top ten,” Lacey acknowledged.  “I’m not saying she wasn’t in the top ten.”

“She wasn’t in our top three,” Thrasher repeated.

“Not in the top three you showed me, Tommy,” Lacey said again.

“Frank, you know better than that,” Morris said in a sorrowful tone.

“Yes, sir,” Lacey responded defiantly, “I do know better than that.  I know exactly, I know exactly what was there.’

“You know better,” Morris repeated.

“Ken,” Norris asked, “whose responsibility is it to hire the person—”

“Plain people,” Morris interjected, meaning regular city employees, and not department heads.

“—that is going to replace Jimmie Ann?” Norris continued.  “Whose responsibility is it?”

“I thought there was a committee set up,” Seaton replied.

“There was—” Lacey began, only to be drowned out by several seconds of crosstalk.

“My understanding,” Seaton continued when the noise settled down, “the department heads hire people in their department.  And this, I suppose, I feel like that this is a little difficult, because when any job is created, I think maybe there was a plan to do some follow up, and—  Anyway, I guess I think that Terry’s the department head, and he has the authority to, without any other action by the commission, to make a decision about people hired in his department.”

“Or the mayor,” Norris added, meaning that department heads could hire “without any other action by” the mayor, as well as by the commission.

“Well,” Morris asked, plaintively, “what’s the mayor here for?”

“There should be no intervention by the commission, or the mayor,” Norris observed, “and they should, the supervisors should be allowed to hire who they need to hire, they feel they need to hire, because that’s who the commission is looking to to get the job done.  Not Jimmie Ann, but the supervisor.  We would deal with the supervisor, if the job was not getting done.  If you don’t do that you start micromanaging the whole thing, so—”

“That’s what y’all are trying to do,” Morris insisted.

Browder said, “I think the mayor has all the free will in the world to suggest, just like I think any one of the commissioners would have, in a department head position, and, I know we’ve talked about this before.  Like I say, I think it’s the department head’s job to hire the people under him, but I still think, you know, the mayor or any one of us could make suggestions to that department head.  I don’t think, you know, that we’re barred from doing that.”

“Sure,” Norris agreed.

“Only time y’all got any power is at the meeting,” Mayor Morris insisted.  “When this meeting’s over, y’all’s authority has quit.  I have to deal with these people every day.  And I deal, at least twenty, twenty-five hours a week, with these people.  This is what I’m trying to get over.  If I cannot pick out who I think—and I’ve hired a many a people, many people in my career.  If I can’t pick out who I think is best for the job, then y’all come up and say, ‘We don’t want them.’  I just don’t think that that’s in the charter, now.”

“I don’t know what Terry told you,” Browder said, returning to the specific hiring question.  “I don’t remember ever having said I didn’t want any one particular person.  The only thing that I’ve heard anyone say at any time was, ‘Terry’s the department head.  Hire whoever you feel you need to put in the position.’  Now, if somebody else has heard something other than that, I wish you’d speak up now.”

“Let me just tell you one thing on that,” Morris said.  “I have hired everyone that’s been hired up here.  They come to me and say, ‘Can we hire them?’  But when it come to this one, they went to y’all.  Which up-surps [sic] my power every which a way.”

“Who have we hired?” Thrasher asked.

Morris ignored the question.  “ Bill [Police Chief Bill McCall] always comes to me. Paul Wallace comes to me.  Well, when did it change?  Just because—”

“Did you hire,” Lacey interrupted, “did you offer to hire the most qualified for the job?”

“According to the applications,” Morris replied.

“Okay, then, no, you didn’t,” Lacey said.  “Because, I mean, we had them, we had them, you ever were there when we did them.  And, no, we didn’t.”

“What do you mean, we?” Morris asked.  “I wasn’t there.”

“You were sitting right there—” Lacey said, indicating a chair, “or right here, and I was sitting there—”

“You added one to it,” Morris said, changing the subject.  “I showed you ten people, and you added one to it.”

“But the top three were the top three,” Lacey insisted.  “And the first girl turned it down, because the money wasn’t right.  The second girl, who everybody wanted to hire anyway, was from Savannah.  And we didn’t want to do that because you didn’t want anybody hired from out of town.”

“When you’ve got qualified people here,” Morris said, agreeing with Lacey’s last sentence.

“Now, it doesn’t matter to me,” Lacey continued.  “I don’t want to be responsible for the person.  Because if we hire her, and if you hire her, then he has no authority over her.  That leaves you with the authority over her.  And if she gets mad at him, she’s going to come to you.”

“She don’t come, she don’t got a job,” Morris said, the meaning of which may have been clear to him, if not to anyone else.

“I don’t know that we’ll ever get anybody to work for the city if we’re going to play these kind of games,” Lacey said, “and I don’t know that we could get any of the ones that wanted to work—”

Pam Young interrupted from the audience.  “Can I say something, please?”

“Sure,” Uncle Tommy said.

“Somebody at this table is lying,” Young asserted, “because I had a commissioner call me, that I’m not going to name, that told me that I was in the top three.  Terry, I’ve interviewed with Terry, he never even told me what the job, what the qualifications were for the job.”

“Well,” Lacey began, “we, and we failed there, because they were supposed to be listed in the paper, too.  And that’s why we got seventy-five applications.  And we, and we also, I think, we, and we also acknowledge we did not list the qualifications, but we didn’t list the pay range, which brings up the problem that, you know— We’re trying to move this city into the 21st century, with technology and everything else, and that was one of the main requirements, was being able to do that, and knowing certain operating systems and things, and that’s how the criteria was supposed to have been set out.  But it wasn’t set out that way, in our, in the ad that was in the paper, and we even fussed about that—”

Young interrupted: “What are the systems you’re talking about?”

“—fussed about the ad,” Lacey concluded.

“There were no qualifications put in the paper,” Norris observed.

“What are they?” Young asked.  Lacey fussed with some papers and did not reply.  “He didn’t even ask me what my qualifications—” Young resumed, only to be interrupted by Uncle Tommy, who had his own fish to fry.

“Let’s get back to my part on Terry, first, then I’ll let her say something.  But I have, just like I say, I have tried and tried to work with Terry.  Now, I know that y’all are the ones to say yes or no.  But I’m asking you to dismiss him. Because I will not work with him.  You’ll have to hire somebody else to go between me and him.  And you take a man that’s, with the perks and everything, making $50,000 a year.  And all he does most of the time is go after the mail, and stuff like that.  And then won’t do what I ask him to do.  Won’t even try to work with me.  Now, y’all do what you want.  I’m throwing it in your hands.”

“Do we need to take a vote on it?” Norris asked

“I, I, I don’t, I don’t understand,” Lacey said.  “What are you throwing in our hands?”

“What do you want us to do?” Norris asked the mayor.

“Frank,” Morris began with some hesitation, “I wanted to keep you out of this—”

“I just want to know what you’re throwing in our hands,” Lacey asked, quickly.

“—I wanted to—” Morris continued, before interrupting himself to respond to Lacey’s last question, “Yeah, I’m throwing it in y’all’s hands.  But I just wanted you know I’m a fixing to say what you told me.  Now, you can deny it or say it, but you told me that you had the votes, after December, to dismiss him.  But you didn’t have— And I said, ‘Well, why don’t you do it now?’  But you wanted to wait until after the elections.  Now you know you told me that.”

“I didn’t say wait until after the election, did I?” Lacey asked

“Well,” Morris replied, “you said December the 2nd.”

“We wanted, we want to, we want to,” Lacey spluttered, before deciding on what tack to pursue, “I said we want to handle things the right way, and get them done the right way.”

“I knew what you—” Morris began.

“Did I not say that?” Lacey insisted.

“I knew where you were—” Morris began again.

“And did I not ask you to back off,” Lacey interrupted again, “and stop trying to bully us into what you’re wanting done, because you didn’t know—”

“You didn’t say nothing about bullying,” Morris replied, having been successfully diverted from the crucial issue.

“Do you feel like that’s what you’re doing to us?” Lacey asked, moving the discussion away from Lacey’s undenied suggestion that Thrasher’s dismissal be put off until December.

“No, I’m not trying to bully,” Morris insisted.  “I’m giving it to you.  You can—”

“What are you asking us to do?” Lacey interrupted.

“I’m asking you to dismiss him,” Morris replied.  “I’m not working with him.  It’s went on for six and a half years, and that’s just it.”

“Sometimes we have to look and see where the real problem is,” Lacey said, “and I, and for the life of me, there are a lot of people I’d rather not work with over my career, but I didn’t have the choice not to work with them, so I made it work.  And it looks like to me we’re in that position right now.  You don’t like him; I don’t know if he likes you or not.  Y’all have got to figure it out, because we’ve got a city to run, and we’ve got business to take care of.  And we need somebody in there to replace Jimmie Ann, and we’ve got to get these things done and we’ve got to quit playing personal politics.”

“Yes, sir,” Browder said, from the choir.

“Why don’t you talk to all these others, then?” Morris asked Lacey.  “Everything I’ve brought up, they’ve voted against it.  But I’m just saying, let’s get it over with.  Either keep him or don’t keep him, but you better hire somebody else, because I am not— I’ve done started by-passing him, anyway.  I go to Paul Wallace.  I’ve did that for a month, now.  I don’t want to argue with him.  I’m getting too old for all of it, and I’m not, I’m just not going to do it.  And I’ve got another year and four months to go on this mayor’s deal.  So y’all can make up your own minds.”

After several seconds of silence, Lacey said, abruptly, “I move we adjourn.”

“I move for you to make a choice,” Morris countered.  “Do you not got the guts to make a choice?”

“I think by adjourning, we do make our choice,” Lacey replied.

“I don’t,” Morris said.  “I want a voice vote.  And I’m— That’s one thing you can’t take away from me—”

“There’s a motion on the table,” Lacey interrupted.  “It requires a second.”

“I make a motion that we fire him,” Morris said.  “That’s my motion.”

“You can’t make a motion when I’ve already got a motion,” Lacey said.

“Yeah,” Morris responded, “you wasn’t supposed to do it.”

“You can move to adjourn any time,” Lacey responded, primly.

“Well,” Morris said, turning his attention to the audience, “I wanted y’all people to see what kind of commissioners you got.  They ain’t got no balls.  The meeting’s adjourned.”

Several voices pointed out that there was no second to the motion to adjourn, then Willie Jones from the audience said to the mayor, “There’s no need for using that kind of language in this meeting.”

Several other voices chimed in in support of that sentiment.

“You’ve got ladies present, right here,” Jones continued, quaintly.

“Figure of speech, Willie,” Morris said.  “Figure of sweet— uh, speech.”

“Use it on the outside of the door,” Jones said.  “Out yonder.  Don’t use it in here.”

“Well,” Morris responded, “you don’t tell me what to do.”

“Well, I’m just suggesting you do it, then,” Jones said.

“All right.” Morris replied.  “You suggest it, but you don’t tell me.”

Morris then asked, “Do I hear a second?”

“To what motion?” Browder asked, with understandable uncertainty.

“He wants to adjourn,” Morris said, indicating Lacey.

“I withdraw my motion,” Lacey said, throwing Morris off his stride.

“What?” Morris asked.

“I withdraw my motion,” Lacey repeated.  “Make whatever motion you want to, Tommy.”

“Well,” Morris said, “I make a motion that we dismiss Terry.  You know, I think it would be good for the whole [unintelligible word].  He goes to y’all, he goes to me, he goes to y’all.  He uses both sides against the middle.  And I’m tired of it.  I’ve done it for six and a half years.  But it’s left up to y’all.”

“Well,” Norris asked, “if Terry doesn’t resign, does that mean you’re going to continue to be mayor?”

“Am I going to continue to be mayor?” Morris asked with surprise.

Norris responded affirmatively.

“If he doesn’t?” Morris asked.

“Right,” Norris replied.  “Have you considered resigning?”

“Never,” Morris replied, firmly.  “Have you?”

“Well,” Norris said, “I really wish you would.”

“I wish you would, too,” Morris responded.

“Mayor?” Jerry Burks said from the audience, interrupting this snappy repartee.  “May I address the commission?”

Several voices from the commission replied affirmatively.

“You, all of you know where I came from, said Burks, who is married to the Jimmie Ann Burks.  “Paul Wallace came from an organization.  Willie Jones was there.  We have, we have— I have never in my life sat through a board meeting to come up with anything like this, that y’all are putting on.  There was organization in that organization.  They went to a board meeting, they did their business, they adjourned and went home.  They had nothing to do with the hiring of the employees, nothing whatsoever.  They didn’t even want to.  They hired a general manager, and that’s it.  And I think that you people would do good to—” 

When Burks trailed off, and there were no further comments from the audience, Morris asked, “Well, are y’all going to make a motion or what?” 

“You have a motion on the floor,” Lacey replied, “and it hasn’t had a second.”

“Well,” Morris said, “if it hasn’t got a second, somebody else make one, then.”

Lacey complied, saying, “I move we adjourn.”

That was not what Morris had in mind. “I still say, I want an up-or-down vote.”

“But you don’t have a second,” Lacey pointed out.  “If you don’t have a second, there is no vote.”

As Lacey was speaking, Morris said to Seaton, “What about that then?  Can I ask for a roll call vote?”

Lacey continued, saying “You don’t bring a motion to the table if you don’t have a second.”

“You make the decision,” Morris told Seaton.

“My decision is,” Seaton responded, “you made a motion and it died for a lack of a second.  Frank’s made a motion to adjourn, and he can’t get a second, so we sit here until someone comes up with a solution, I guess. [Pause.]  Which, my recommendation would be, someone second Frank’s motion that we adjourn.  And everybody have an opportunity to maybe think about these problems and come back up here next time and use, a new try to move forward and doing things like it needs to be done.  Now the mayor is upset about some things, and I understand why.  The mayor has overreacted.  And the mayor has every right to make his motion, but we’ve got to move forwards, just like Frank said.  And we’ve got to move forward.  And at the least you need people to find a way to work together and get past these personal differences.  Everybody’s got to work on themselves, and doing better.  I know Terry will do better, and I know Terry and you, Mayor, need to be able to communicate.  That’s why, that’s the whole point of this June 16th meeting, or June 30th, whatever it was.  Y’all can’t communicate with one another.  And that needs to change.”

Morris then addressed Thrasher directly.  “You know, you need to get a different attitude.  I’m the mayor.  I was voted by the people.  He was put in here by people, the commissioners, to work.  He should listen to me some.”

“And he does,” Seaton said.  “He does.  But he’s got a job to do—”

“Very little,” Morris said.

“I just wonder, though, you know,” Lacey began.  “If you didn’t have a second for your motion, why would you bring it up in a meeting, other than to further humiliate this board and the city, and drag our name through the mud even further, and prevent us from doing good in the city like we should be doing, as opposed to continuing to harp on the same things that, obviously, there’s a problem, but we don’t do anything good to make the problem better.  All we do is deepen the gap.  And I don’t have a problem at all with voting on your motion, but I wouldn’t have brought the motion here if I didn’t have a second.  Because all that’s doing is being divisive, and that’s what you’ve done tonight.  You’ve done a very good job of dividing yourself from everyone else, and I—”

“You know we’ve already been divided—” Morris began.

“No, no, no you haven’t,” Lacey interrupted.  “No you haven’t, Mayor.  No you haven’t.  I think there’s been, I know Jeff has, and I know I have.  I mean, you know, there’s been people that have supported you throughout—”

“Why don’t you look at me when you talk?” Morris asked.

“I’m reading,” Lacey responded.

“Are you afraid to look at me?” Morris asked, ignoring Lacey’s response.

“Tommy,” Lacey responded wearily, “I’m not afraid to look at you at all.  I’m sitting here, I’m, I’m—”

“Why don’t you look at me?” Morris persisted.  “You’re talking about me, why don’t you look at me?”

“Why are you doing this to us?” Lacey asked, flatly.

 “I’m wanting to get some action,” Morris replied, belligerently.

“Do you have a second?” Lacey asked, impatiently.  “If you don’t have a second, how are you going to get action?  What kind of action do you want?—”

“I’m waiting on y’all,” Morris replied.

“—Are you wanting the newspapers to act?” Lacey continued.  “Are you wanting the community to act?”

“Y’all are,” Morris replied.  “Y’all seem to be wanting the newspapers to act.”

“No, Tommy,” Lacey responded, “we simply want to run this city for the best of these citizens, and you’ve done a great job in helping us keep cost down, in helping us realign some things, but this is completely— It completely destroys everything you worked up to until now.  Because you’re wanting to make sure that everybody knows you’re the mayor, and by golly you have a right to do something.  You do have a right, but it takes a second.  If I want to do something, it takes a second.  I wanted to adjourn; I couldn’t get my second.  We have to work together, and if we can’t work together, which this shows we can’t work together, then we have a serious problem.”

“Well, I’m just telling you,” Morris said, with unabated defiance, “y’all done made your decision, but I’m just telling you: hire somebody to work between me and him.”

“Well, we’re not going to do that,” Norris said.

“Well,” Morris responded, “I ain’t talking to him.”

Norris then said, jokingly, “Well, just I wouldn’t talk to him either, Mayor.  I wouldn’t talk to him either.  I just wouldn’t talk to him.”

“Some people don’t know how he is,” Morris complained.

“We know how you are, though,” said an unidentified man in the audience.

“Huh?” Morris responded.

“We know how you are,” the man repeated.

“I know how you are, too,” Morris replied.

“You don’t even know me,” the man said, dismissively.

“Yeah, I do, too,” Morris insisted.

“But I’ll tell you what I believe,” Morris said, “It may be right, it may be wrong, but you’ll know where I stand when I open my mouth.  It ain’t like some people, that’ll cut you in the back ever, every way you go.  But let’s get the meeting over with.  I just told you what I mean.”

“Well, I think we really need to assess the situation here,” Browder said, referring to hiring a replacement for Burks.  “If we wait another meeting goes by before we hire anyone, whoever that person is, is going to be in a critical bind, are they not?”

“That’s already been taken care of,” Thrasher said, softly.  “That part has.”

“Okay,” Browder said.

“What’s already been taken care of?” Morris asked, suspiciously.

“All we’re looking at is—” Browder began, as the mayor and others begin to speak.

We’ve already got somebody lined up starting in this position,” Thrasher responded.

“I’m not going to do it again,” Lacey said, referring to making a motion to adjourn.

“I move we adjourn,” Browder said, taking the hint.

“Second,” Lacey said.  “I’m good at seconds.”

And the meeting ended there—fittingly, in light of the chaos and acrimony which had been on display over the previous two hours, without a vote being taken on the motion to adjourn.

Town Board Meeting

For such a short agenda, Adamsville’s June town board meeting went on for a long time—nearly two hours.  But, once again, the level of acrimony and dissent remained low.

The minutes were unanimously approved on a motion by Jeff Browder, seconded by Frank Lacey, and the financial reports were approve without dissent on a motion by Lacey, seconded by Browder.

Lacey then asked Police Chief Bill McCall whether he thought installing a “photo cop” similar to the one recently installed in Selmer would be good for Adamsville.

“I think it would be a good resource,” McCall replied, not only to catch speeder, but also because Adamsville has three “blind corners,” referring to the intersection of highways 64 and 22/117 in downtown Adamsville.  “We’ve just been blessed that there ain’t been a tragedy there.”  McCall said that the town could get a survey done at no charge to assess the feasibility of the system, and that if the town met certain criteria the system would not cost the town anything and in fact would actually bring in money.

The board then discussed the enforcement of speed limits within the Adamsville town limits, the upshot of which was that Adamsville police will reduce the leeway they have been giving speeders and will start issuing more tickets.  “Forty-five is the magic number,” McCall said, “but it’s fixing to drop.”

* * *

Dwana Garrison then asked McCall to tell the board about an unexpected gift to the town of Adamsville from a retired lieutenant colonel who had attended the recent Buford Pusser Festival.  McCall’s attempts to do so were repeatedly interrupted by Garrison, who appeared to be more interested in basking in her late father’s “glory” than in acknowledging the generosity of one of her late father’s fans.

McCall explained that, “at the festival I did a memorial to the trooper that lost his life, the only one in the state we had that lost his life, and if it had not been for his in-car video recorder they would have never know who killed that trooper.  And I said it’s a vital, vital instrument” that all police cruisers should be equipped with.  The next week he got a phone call “from this lady from Washington state, who was at the festival, who I would not know if she walked in this door tonight.  A lieutenant Army colonel, retired, I believe.  ‘What could I do to help you?  What would be your greatest need, if I could help you with something?’  I said, ‘We need those in-car recorders.’  She said, ‘I heard you.  I heard your speech, I heard what you said, and I’m going to help you get some.’  She didn’t say how many or what.”

Last week, McCall said, he got a “check in the mail for $7,000 from this retired lieutenant colonel, earmarked to buy in-car recorders for the police department….  I got a hold of Decatur Electronics, and I figured they’d cost about $3,500 apiece, and I talked to our representative in Tennessee, told him how it came about that we were getting these from them, or, I say we usually buy our electronics from them.  So he gets on the phone and he calls his boss, and Decatur Electronics donates us one.  And then, Decatur Electronics sells us three in-car camcorders, that’s sitting in my office right now, for $7,000, that normally are $3,500 apiece.  We got those for $2,333 dollars.  Plus they gave us one, I’ve had one in the office.  Every car on the force, now, will get, installed, a new in-car recorder.”

“And why, Bill?” Garrison prompted the chief to get to the really important part.

“Because of this lady,” McCall began, before breaking off to recount another incident of her generosity.  “Let me tell you what she did last year. I’m going to go ahead and tell it.  I’m going to tell it.  She offered to donate a drug dog, I didn’t know this [unintelligible word or two].  She offered to donate a drug dog and an officer to be trained with that dog to McNairy County, and somehow or another they didn’t return her call,” so she ended up donating the dog and officer training to a law enforcement agency in Washington state.

Brushing this aside, Garrison said “But what, I just wanted you to tell—”

“It was just because of this lady’s nice gesture—” McCall continued, persisting in his wrong-headed insistence on giving the donor some credit, only to be interrupted by Garrison with a loud, “No!”

“What did she do it in memory of?” she insisted, “why she did it in memory of?  She wanted to do it in honor of.  That’s what I want to get, so that the mayor, who’s been saying—”

McCall finally got the message.  “She said, ‘Don’t use my name.’  Just do it in honor of Sheriff Buford Pusser.”

“So, see!” Garrison said, triumphantly.  “Strangers that come into our town, and folks that spend money during that, and come into this festival, that some people don’t think that it’s really worth it, look what the whole community, besides getting to enjoy a good time, is getting.  Wouldn’t you agree, commissioners?  I mean.  I mean, I just think we need to write here a nice letter, and we need to do—”

“We’ve already mailed it,” McCall said.

“Because when somebody does something like that,” Garrison continued, “and they sure don’t have to do that, you know, and doing it for the reason she done it for, and she done that dog in honor of, too, and we have a copy of that, if y’all’d like, that article.” 

* * *

“All right,” Lacey said, when Garrison finished.  “I’d like you to go ahead and make that phone call, Bill, if the rest of the commissioners are okay with it, on the photo thing.” 

Turning to a completely unrelated topic, Lacey said, “My second question was, what’s the city’s responsibility, and what can you do, if you find, or we locate illegal aliens in this town?”

McCall explained that there was really nothing that local authorities could do, because the state of Tennessee has no law on the books for dealing with illegal aliens.  “The only authority to determine the alien status are federal officers under Title 8 of the United States Code 287.  We cannot arrest, we cannot detain an alien here, or an immigrant here, solely because they look like they don’t belong here.  That’s profiling.  That’s strictly against federal guidelines, state guidelines, Ken [town attorney Ken Seaton] will tell you that, all the way down to the end.  The only thing we could do is this: if they break our laws, like DUI, or like we did have one that we sent back.”  McCall said that the department had taken a criminal complaint about a man who turned out to be an illegal alien, and when they alerted the federal authorities the man was deported. “Three months later he shows back up in Tennessee, right back here at the same complex, with his wife, again.  We knew that he was an illegal alien, because they arrested him, come got him, and sent him back.  Then we just go arrest him, because we had knowledge of it and we knew it, and held him in detention, called them again.  But there again, they make the sole choice.  Nobody else can do it except you’ve been trained by them, and you’ve got to have a letter by the Secretary of Immigration and Custom Enforcement to give you the authority to do that.  It’s pretty tough.  In other words, like I said, it don’t look good for the home team, right now.  The state of Tennessee must adopt, Frank, to answer your question, the state of Tennessee has got to adopt some federal laws, like Arizona did.”  

“But,” Browder asked, “if they break a law, then—”

“If they break my state law,” McCall said, “we arrest them, yeah.  I can arrest them on that.  But I cannot arrest them for just being an alien here.  I can’t even stop them because they don’t look like they’re Americans.”

“If they break a law,” Lacey asked, “a Tennessee law, or an Adamsville law, and you arrest them, what do we do?”

“We arrest them,” McCall replied, “and we can do an alien status check on them through our NCIC computer, which goes to, down in Virginia.  And supposedly, he says that we can, the very best we can do, we get that officer on the street some information back, hopefully, within 20 to 30 minutes.  That’s a long time to detain somebody for that status.  But if it’s something out of the ordinary that we thought that really needed to be checked on, we do that.  If they came back, if there’s a problem with them, the only thing we can do is call them.  We don’t arrest them.  We can’t arrest them.  We don’t have the authority to arrest them.  It’s plainly stated: ‘the authority is determined in title 8 of the federal code 287,’ and only— let me see.  City, county, and even state troopers cannot arrest them.  On that charge of being an illegal alien.  We just can’t do it.”

“Well,” Mayor Tommy Morris interjected, wryly, “when they send them all back, somebody around here’s going to have to go to work.”

“That’s why they’re all coming here,” McCall said.  “We don’t have nothing against them here.  We don’t have nothing that says they can’t come here.  And that’s why they come here.  Tennessee.  Tennessee has no law against them.”

“We don’t notice near as many of them now as we did,” the mayor observed, before asking if anyone had anything to say about the parks and recreation report.

Garrison did. “I’d just like to say, hats off to all the city employees who worked so hard for our festival, for our entire community.  The state tells that there was about, from Wednesday to Saturday night, the state estimated there was about 10,000 that came through here, and it was the biggest one that we’ve had to date.  But what I want to thank the employees for— but also, any time Paul Wallace’s group, they jumped in, public works department, parks and rec department, police department, everybody pulled together to make this a wonderful festival.  And, you know, it couldn’t have been done without those, the help of everybody and the other volunteers throughout our community, that volunteered to do stuff, and I just want to say a very special thank you, and to know that they all worked so hard, wouldn’t you say, Debbie?  You couldn’t ask anybody to do something that didn’t just jump right in and help us.  And what’s that guy’s name?  Dr. Irvin?  Paul Wallace, he was a real, well, you know, an asset through it, and the museum and some other problems we’re having.  I just wanted to mention that, mayor, and how much appreciate it, and I hope the whole commission did, and what all they done to make our community look good.”

When she finished, Mayor Morris asked for a motion to accept all reports, which was provided by Lacey, seconded by Garrrison, and passed by a unanimous voice vote. 

* * *

In old business, after a long discussion the board unanimously approved the second reading of the sign ordinance (on a motion by Lacey, seconded by Browder), and, more quickly, the second reading of the B-1 and B-2 residential ordinance (on a motion by Browder, seconded by Garrison).

The next agenda item was “Vision/Mission Statement,” a copy of which was included in each commissioner’s packet and read as follows, in its entirety:

VISION

To be the best small city in the mid-south in which to live, work, play in or visit.

MISSION

To offer the citizens of the area the finest services of gas, water, sewer, trash, police & fire protection & providing good recreational opportunities, while keeping taxes and rates as low as possible.

Town Administrator Terry Thrasher explained, “It’s the one y’all developed.  We looked at it.   Ya’ll were going to think about it over this, since the last meeting, and see if there was any changes you wanted to make.”

“I don’t like that,” Mike Norris said, “but I haven’t had time to think about it.”

“I didn’t know about it,” Mayor Morris remarked.  “Well, you want to table it until next meeting?”

“That’s what I prefer to do,” Norris said, and the other commissioners were in agreement.

The board also tabled the next item, “Engineering Service,” after Thrasher said “I really put that on there thinking we would have more feedback from the engineering companies that we sent the letters off to about water/sewer, but I’ve only had two answers.” 

* * *

The next agenda item, “Seaton Loop - Water,” engendered more discussion.  Utility Director Paul Wallace Plunk began by saying, “Y’all asked me at the last meeting to give you a cost for the Seaton Loop tie-together, and that cost, estimate cost $16,500.  That’s about 3,000 feet of line.”

Plunk said that he had received a petition with twelve signatures requesting that the line be put in.  In response from a question from Browder, Thrasher said that sixteen hookups per mile were required to make a project feasible, so the twelve signatures for just over half a mile (2,876 feet) was within than range.

“Let me ask you one thing on that,” Morris said.  “You say you’ve got a petition signed.  That’s just like signing a petition on a lot of other stuff.  Did they put up any money?”

“No,” Plunk replied, “but they would have to before.  They would have to pay a tap fee before anything was ever done.”

The board members then discussed the costs of such a project, as well as the possibility of putting in a gas line at the same time that the water line was installed.

“I make the motion, then,” Norris said at last, “that if we get the signed participants on the petition to, get a check for their taps, then we would proceed, you know, to put a water line in.  And also ask them about gas, at some time.”  His motion, seconded by Garrison, passed by a unanimous roll call vote. 

* * *

Morris then read “New Business,” only to be interrupted by Norris. “May I ask a question, before we go to that, on old business?  What is the status of the charter?”

Thrasher said that he hadn’t heard anything, whereupon Garrison said, “It did not pass in the senate.”

“Well,” Norris said, “I have two other things that I wanted to ask about.  One is, and I don’t know if this would come under old business or new, but it’s, we’ve been talking about this.  What is the situation with Jimmie Ann’s, what is the situation with applicants on Jimmie Ann’s position?”  Jimmie Ann Burk is retiring this year as town clerk.

“We’re down to three candidates,” Thrasher said, “and Frank looked through these, what day was that, one day last week, Thursday, and we’re going to make a decision, probably in the next two days.”

But, Garrison said, “last time I talked to you I thought you was going to bring it before the board, and then make a—  That didn’t work, or—?”

“I’m ready to make a recommendation to the board,” Thrasher said.

“Well, then,” Garrison asked, “why have we got to wait two more days?  I mean, I’m just asking.  I don’t know.”

“I really wanted to do a little more reference checking,” Thrasher said.

Norris joined the discussion, saying “I was of the opinion that we had someone within the city employment that was under serious consideration.”

“That fell apart,” Thrasher said.  “He backed out.”

“But,” Garrison persisted, “you, yeah, but I know when I talked to you a few days ago you said you basically had somebody you were ready to, I don’t know who it is, you were going to bring it to the—”

“I’m ready to bring,” Thrasher began, “like I say, I would have liked, I would like to check a few more references, but I’ve checked enough of her records—”

“He’s to bring it to me,” Morris interjected, “and then I’m going to bring it to y’all.”

“Oh,” Garrison said.  “Okay.  That was just what I was last told by him.  I’m sorry.” 

* * *

“Is that all?” the mayor asked Norris, setting off a quarter-hour discussion of a recurrent agenda item.  (The good news is that at the end of that quarter hour the matter appeared finally to have been put to rest.)

“One other question,” Norris replied.  “The property down here on 64.  We agreed on a price, and we agreed to put a for-sale sign up.  And I’ve not seen a for-sale sign yet, that’s been two months ago.  What’s the problem?”

“Teddy Hughes is supposed to be making us a sign,” Thrasher said, before apologizing for having let the matter slip. 

In the audience were Carolyn and Albert Bazzell, and Carolyn Bazzell demanded to know why the board had been willing to sell the property to another person for $8,000 but would not sell it to here and her husband for $10,000 when they offered that amount. “So why am I not as good as she is,” Bazzell asked.  “That’s what my question is, is how I have been here since 1965, I have never failed to pay my bills, and I have always tried to be a good citizen.”

“And I think you have,” Garrison said, smarmily.  “And I was in favor, since she didn’t get it, to automatically go right next to you, so I would like for the commission to address this, here.”  She does her usual self-righteous routine.

Bazzell was not through, though, and she and her husband, Albert, regaled the board with extensive complaints about the obstacles various town employees had thrown up to their efforts to expand their business.  For a long and painful period the board room was utter bedlam, with board members carrying on conversations with each other while Carolyn Bazzell droned incessantly onward at the top of her voice, apparently oblivious to the fact that no one was paying any attention to her except for Garrison, who punctuated Bazzell’s disquisition with occasional self-congratulatory interjections.

After an interminable period, Bazzell said, “I’m still willing to give the ten, that I offered.  I’m still willing to do that,” and Mayor Morris asked, “Can we sell it to her?” before the bedlam resumed.

Finally, Morris said, “As far as I’m concerned, for $10,000, if she wants it, she can have it.  Put it in there just like it was for that other girl.  If you don’t do something for a year, it comes back to us with so much discount.  Is that okay with y’all.”  When he asked for a motion, Lacey responded.

“I make a motion that we sell the lot to these people—I don’t know who they are—for $10,000 with the condition that it be a building such as that [indicating some papers the board had just been handed by the Bazzells during the preceding “discussion”], or in a year it reverts back to the city—”

“Or,” Mayor Morris suggested, “if they’re showing good faith, we can give them an extension.”

“—and” Lacey continued, throwing in a wild card, “the money be used to purchase the two lots on Crowe Street for $10,000.”

“I’ll second that motion,” Garrison said quickly, before Mayor Morris reasonable asked, “Can I ask which two lots on Crowe Street we’re buying?”

“The ones we’re using already,” Garrison said promptly.  “The ones that the city park uses over there, that are in between, that we could never get them to price it.  They finally priced it, and if somebody else buys it—”

“By the water tank,” Lacey added.

“Do we need them for the park?” Morris asked, which was answered affirmatively, and after some further discussion the motion passed by a unanimous roll call vote.

“Before y’all get off,” Thrasher said with misplaced optimism [the meeting was to continue on for another three-quarters of an hour], “we’ve got something we just signed this afternoon we need to add.  We need to award the contract for the Delta Regional Grant filtration plant to Barge Wagner.  They’ve done all the footwork, and we agreed that anybody that did the footwork would get the engineering support.”

Garrison made the motion, Browder seconded it, and it carried by unanimous voice vote. 

* * *

“MuniGas Contract,” Mayor Morris then read from the agenda, setting of another marathon discussion.

“Well,” Thrasher said, “you all have a copy in your packet, and I think our legal adviser has—  What about it, Ken?”

“I … don’t know,” Seaton began, doubtfully.  “In y’all’s packets, you’ve got two little pages.  Y’all see those?  I asked Paul Wallace to send me what went with those two little pages, and it’s about sixty pages.  I’ve tried to read it and understand it.  It’s too— I don’t know, I’ve struggled with how to say this.  It’s just about over my head…. It’s tough, and I don’t know where to recommend we go from here.  These sixty pages, this is a language that, a lot of it I don’t, I’m not familiar with.  This is oil, energy law.  It’s like it was written down in Texas, in some big tall building, I’m sure, in Dallas or Houston, and it’s just tough for me to understand.”

“Do you know of anybody you could contact on that to help you out on it?” Morris asked.

“Well—” Seaton said, still doubtful.

“I think—” Plunk said, “Fayette/Hardeman County has already, they have already signed their contract with, and Donny Leggett is the manager of Fayette/Hardeman Utility District on gas, and he’s the one that went with us to Chattanooga to the TVA group, and TVA knows— Their lawyers have looked over all this stuff, and TVA says ‘We wish we could do it, but we’re a government entity and we can’t do this, but we wish we could.’  So, Fayette/Hardeman has already, they’re already on the program to buy gas.  They’re buying gas for the— now.  What we’re trying to do is get in so they can do the same thing for us.”

“Well,” Morris observed, “this is a long term, and I want to make sure that we’re not signing away the city hall, up here.”

“MuniGas is a ten-year contract,” Plunk acknowledged.  “TEAC, which is what Selmer’s with and Savannah’s with, is a twenty-year contract.  That’s who they’re with.  We talked to the TEAC representative, what day was it, Terry?  Last week.  One day last week.  Might have been Thursday.  I don’t remember for sure.  But, he— That’s who Savannah and Selmer is with.  They only get a forty-five to fifty cent rebate back, where MuniGas for the last fifteen months has give eighty cents rebate back per MCF [million cubic feet].”

Morris asked if that would continue, and Plunk replied that “Nobody knows if it’s going to stay that. They’re hoping theirs will go to a dollar.  It started out, was at fifty cents.  It started out fifty cents, MuniGas did, and now, then, they’re up to eighty cents.”

“But you got to remember,” Thrasher added, “if we lose it, it goes back.  It doesn’t mean we have to pay more than we’re paying through TVA now.”

Plunk said, “If you don’t get any rebate whatsoever, let’s say that you go with— and we’re going to have to go with somebody, or either we’re going to have to buy it straight off the, at market price.”

“Like we’ve been doing?” Seaton asked.

“No, TVA has been buying for us.  Now, then, TVA—”

“At market price?” Seaton asked again.

“Yeah,” Plunk replied, “whatever the market price is.  But this is a rebate off of the market price.  If we’re not with any of these, then we’re going to pay market price.”

“Well,” Seaton said, “I was here, now, at that last meeting, when that gentleman presented this to you all, and I was very impressed with him.  He seemed honest.  He seemed like to me he knew what he was talking about.  He wasn’t pushy.  And I don’t have any reason to question this idea.  It sounds good—sounds almost too good to be true.  I just— Now, the easy thing for me to do is say it’s fine, go forward.  I just, I don’t feel, I don’t feel competent to say that.”

“You want to talk to, who?” Morris asked.  “Fayette and Hardeman County—”

“Well,” Seaton replied, “that’s what I was leading into saying a while ago.  There’s been a little bit of a track record with these folks, and some much bigger buyers than the city of Adamsville has made some decisions about this, and maybe we could try and take advantage of some relationships, and ask around, maybe get some insurance [sic] that way.  I don’t have anything, I don’t have any specific concerns.  It’s just that that stuff there is just over my head.  The scary thing about it is the ten years, and, you know, a lot can happen in ten years.  Who knows what can happen in ten years?  Five years from now we might see that there’s something about that document that ties our hands and costs us.”

“I don’t think that it will do that,” Plunk said.  “The only thing, let’s say you, you don’t get any rebate at all, then you’re going to pay market price.”

Seaton remained uncertain.  “There might be some other means out there, though, Paul Wallace, where you could save, where you could save money, that’s not available to you.  You see what I’m saying?  You’re tied.  I just— What I would like to hear somebody, I’d like to hear somebody who knows what they’re talking about, tell us what’s wrong with this.  Maybe there isn’t anybody out there like that.”

“Might be another Enron deal,” Morris suggested.

“When do we have to make a decision on this?” Garrison asked.  “As soon as possible, or not, or when?”

“Come September 1st,” Plunk replied, “we are going to have to buy gas somewhere, for whatever price it is.”  [And in the course of that one sentence, which took Plunk seven seconds to utter, Garrison, as is her wont, interrupted four separate times, saying “Okay” at two different places, “Yes, sir,” at one, and “Right, okay” at another.] 

“So, could, we—” Garrison said, her patience nearly exhausted by Plunk’s long-windedness, “Would you feel better then, Mr. Seaton, if we end up and were able to get you in touch with some of those type of people, before you made a recommendation, or, or would somebody on the board want to take that, or—”

Seaton replied, “I don’t mind, and I’m glad to hear there’s no hurry.  And I don’t— Paul Wallace and I and Terry, we’ll think about it.  We’ll try to find some people to talk to, and come back to the board at the next meeting.”

“We can even talk with TVA,” Plunk added.  “TVA will still manage everything that we do.”

“The way interpret this stuff,” Seaton said, “TVA’s a party to it.  The way I interpret those documents, TVA is a supplier, and TVA does not, will not purchase the gas for us any more.”

Plunk agreed.  “TVA does not, will not purchase the gas for us any more, like they’ve been doing.”

“They will supply the gas for us,” Seaton said.

Plunk continued. “All I had to do was call TVA and tell them, say, ‘Buy me 10,000 [unintelligible word] this morning, at this price.’  And TVA would— Now, if we go with MuniGas, they can’t purchase it for us, they can’t be the marketer for it, but they will check all the records.  They will make sure that MuniGas does everything they’re supposed to do.  We’re still with TVA.”

“And we’re going to stay with them?” Seaton said.

“Yes,” Plunk confirmed.

“And I think if they’re involved in the execution of this—” Seaton began.

“And they have looked over all this,” Plunk added.

“Then,” Seaton said, “those are the people, maybe, we need to get some reassurance from.”

Plunk said “I’ll try to contact Jim Powers tomorrow, with TVA.”

“Tell him your lawyer,” Seaton said with a chuckle, “tell him he don’t know what he’s doing.  He needs some help.”

“Nah,” Plunk replied, “I won’t tell him that.”

Norris then raised another issue. “Regardless of what we do on this, are we— I understand, the last time that we talked about this, that we’re looking at roughly 20% increase in our gas prices?”

“It’s a possibility,” Plunk agreed.

“What’s the percentages of that happening?” Norris asked.

“We don’t know,” Morris said, but Plunk offered a guess: “Probably 90%.”

“Ninety percent,” Norris repeated.  “That’s what I figured.”

“With the kind of numbers I see in the paper,” Seaton offered, “I’m surprised it’s only 20%.”

Plunk pointed out that “Savannah has already had to have an increase.”

“The reason I’m bringing that up,” Norris explained, “is that I wonder if there— How is that going to effect the citizens here, that receive gas?  I mean, they’re already paying four dollars a gallon for gasoline.  Now we’re fixing to have to up the gas prices by 20% or more.”

“But that’s not really our—” Garrison began, only to be rescued by Thrasher.

“You could make a determination,” the town administrator said, “if you look on, when we get into the budget, what you’re going to have operating overhead, and you could take some retained earnings and not shift the price to the consumer as quick as possible.  But you have to be very, very careful.  Because you’re basically, to keep the city at a comfortable footing, you’re probably talking about going up on your gas rates whatever percentage it comes into the door.  We pay eleven, we’ve go to go up—”

“Well,” Plunk offered, “right now, we have gas in storage.  We have enough gas in storage, that we’ve already bought, we’ve already hedged.  And that gas that we’ve got in storage cost us $7.91 for an MCF.  Right now, today’s market, it’s probably eleven or twelve dollars.  So that’s five dollars an MCF more than what we’ve got.  But we’re going to run out.  We’re not putting any more in storage right now, because I told them do not put anything else in storage until we decide what we’re going to do.”

Thrasher explained that “that seven dollar gas is a result of buying gas from four to ten, and it averages out at seven.  We can keep the average down here, but it’s eventually going up there somewhere.”

“Well,” Garrison opined, “we’ve been doing very good for the past few years.”

“Is this going to effect you this winter,” Norris asked, “are there any programs out there available that would help the citizens—”

“Heating assistance, is available,” Thrasher replied.

Norris said, “We need to be advertising, and go on and get it out in the paper and all, and tell them what they can do.”

“See,” Thrasher explained, “the government has to tell you how much money they’re going to put in the kitty, and then the more money they put in the kitty, the more people that qualify.  It’s all in how much money they’re willing to put in, how much we can—”

Jimmie Ann Burk added, “It will be run in the paper when they know how much money they’re going to get.  They’ll run it in the paper, and then Cindy will have the forms over at Senior Citizens.  There’s lots of ways, you know, that people will find out about it.”

After some further discussion, Browder returned to the subject of the rebate currently offered by MuniGas. “When we talk about eighty cents, what kind of money are we talking about saving now, I mean I guess the basic question is how many MCF we’re going to burn.”

“We burned, last year, 197,000 MCF,” Plunk replied.  “We’ve run just a little under 200,000 MCF per year.  I had some figures with me last time.  I don’t have them with me now.  The eighty cents would save the city a hundred-and-something dollars.”

“If it was 200,000, it would be $160,000,” Thrasher said.

“Now,” Plunk continued, “the one that Selmer and Savannah is with is Tennessee Energy.  For three, three or four years, they got no rebate whatsoever, because the fellow that was managing it played the market with it and he lost three and a half million dollars, so they didn’t get any discount.  There wasn’t any there to get.”

Finally, Mayor Morris said “I’m for letting Seaton and them meet together, and let’s put an end to this thing.  [To Seaton:]  Work on things.”  The board was in agreement with this. 

* * *

“Department Heads Salary,” Morris said, reading the bottom item on the agenda and setting of a short but confusing exchange.  “I put that on there.  I think we need to put a limit on department heads’ salary.  If they’re going to be a salaried department head, I don’t think we ought to pay no overtime if they have to work in place of some of their men, or something….  Just like Bill, here, is the chief of police here, we paid him some overtime this last week.  He worked, what, eight hours overtime or something?”

“All day Friday,” McCall replied, briefly.

“No,” Morris said, “you got a, you worked in somebody’s place, didn’t you?  What was it I saw on there?”

“All I remember is holiday pay,” Thrasher said.  “Now, we had a cop or two that picked up, somebody had some overtime, but it wasn’t Bill.  What we’ve been doing, is the police department works straight shifts.  If you get a holiday, like the next holiday coming up is the 4th of July.  Instead of trying to cover the shifts paying overtime, police department just works their regular shift.  So the guy that’s working on the 4th of July would get his regular pay, plus the day of holiday’s pay.  So instead of getting ten days pay, he’ll actually get eleven.”

I looked at it wrong, then,” Morris said, “but I want to see last week’s pay, Bill.  Don’t have to do it tonight.  I’ll do it tomorrow.”

“Can I say something?” Asked Plunk, himself a department head.  “I don’t get no overtime.” 

* * *

“All right, let’s go on,” Morris said.  “We’re down to the budget now.”

Thrasher attempted a brief summary. “General fund we project to be $4,190 to the black, next fiscal year.  The sanitation special fund would probably come out about 7,250 to the black.  State street aid is 56,000 and 56,000 out.  ATD drug fund, probably $250 ahead. Debt service number one for water bond, 7,500 ahead.  The capital projects, or the CDBG grants, the water tank and the water filtering project, those zero out.  Same amount comes in goes out.  Water/Sewer fund could come out in the black 26,250, the gas could be in the black about 122,000, and the grand total of the budget next year would be about $208,740 to the good, under these numbers that we gave you guys.  And this budget is heavily loaded in capital.  We put a lot of money in there in capital, because we haven’t put a lot of money in there for the past few years, and there’s lots of things we need to do.  We’ve got trucks in the utility department that need replacing.  We’re looking at a vac—how do you pronounce it?—vactron truck.  You going to bring that up a little bit about the auction sale?  We’ve got an auction sale that’s got two trucks in it that we need one of, and if we can get over there and they’re in good shape, we can buy them right and it would save a lot of money.”

“Another thing,” Morris interjected, “is we’re renting that vac-tractor, is that what they call it, or something? You know, we’re cleaning out the sewer lines with it.  Cost $2,800 a month rent, and there’s one in this auction that, just according to the paper, looks good, and Terry called today on that.”

After some further discussion, Thrasher asked, “What do y’all want to do about the budget?  If you approve the first reading tonight, you can come back on the 30th for a quick meeting and let that be the second reading and we will be ahead of the wire.”

“Okay,” Garrison asked, “we do have money in there, though, for all these personnel changes that’s going to be taking place at city hall, correct?  I mean, I just want to make sure that had stayed in there, and that we were going to have to up some of those positions and some not.”

“We’ve got a good budget, and everybody’s getting, what, a 2.7 raise?” Morris said in summary.  “And we’ve got in there for capital outlays, of laying some water lines, some vehicles, it’s just a guess deal.  You know, you got to put down a bunch of numbers.”

“Well, I had two questions,” Norris said, to no one’s surprise.  “One is, you know, in looking the budget over, I couldn’t tell, so I just wanted to ask, you know.  There’s been a tremendous increase in the cost of fuel.  Have we, has that been adjusted for in this budget, because it’s going to like double this year as opposed to what it was last year.”

“Well, I had two questions.  One is, you know, in looking the budge over, I couldn’t tell, so I just wanted to ask, you know.  There’s been a tremendous increase in the cost of fuel.  Have we, has that been adjusted for in this budget, because it’s going to like double this year as opposed to what it was last year.”

“It always,” Thrasher said, “but we just threw the ball farther down field this time to say maybe we got it in front of what the gas price is going to be. But if it doesn’t, remember gas is a revenue fund and water is a revenue fund, and some of this capital money we’ve got in there we may not spend anyway, so our budget will be on firm footing if gas does do that.”

“Well,” Norris said, “that was the other thing.  I was asking as far as revenue was concerned, you know, there’s people that are traveling less, there spending less on gas now.  Does that mean we’re going to less revenue tax-wise—”

“But that goes into street paving and things like that,” Thrasher explained.  “It doesn’t go into general funds.”

“All right,” Norris continued, “the other question I had, you know, this is not a big money item, but I think it’s important to us.  And that is, I didn’t see any kind of a specific dollar amount in there for landscaping, maintenance, and mowing and all kind of things I asked about last year.  And, you know, we’ve had problems with that for the last two years, you know, being able— We shouldn’t have to.  There ought to be money allotted for that, and we ought to be able to just go do it.”

Thrasher explained that those expenses were included in the general fund. “We don’t break it out, just like for flowers and signs.”

Lacey then said, “The question I’d like to ask about the budget is, what are the different departments doing to cut back?” to which Plunk and McCall both said they had addressed the matter in meetings with their departments.

“Those are the things I think the people we represent need to see,” said Lacey (who is currently campaigning for the position of state representative, to go with his currently held positions as school board member, chairman of the school board, and commissioner of the town of Adamsville), “is us being wise with our money.”

“Well,” Morris observed, “the homeowners are having to cut back; we need to cut back.  Show our good faith.  They’re the ones that really, I guess, are paying the bills.”

“I make a motion that we pass the budget on the first reading,” Lacey said, before gratuitously adding, “without having to raise taxes.”

“We ain’t got tax raises in there,” Morris pointed out, and the motion passed unanimously after being seconded by Garrison.

“We need to amend the motion of the budget this year,” Thrasher said before the meeting broke up.  “Sanitation fund, we need to amend the motion that we will take in up to 186,200, is that what you got?  And we need to amend the sanitation budget from 160,000 to 162,500…. So I need a motion that we amend the 2007-2008 budget.”  “You’re amending from 100,000 up to 186,200, and from 160,000 to 162,500.”

Lacey made the motion, which was seconded by Garrison and passed by a unanimous roll call vote.

The last word was had by Shawn Sisk, in the audience: “I want to interject something.  Several of you, since y’all raised up saving money, if y’all will allow me to work with you, I can save you a couple of thousand, two or three thousand dollars a year on your fee for your sirens.  That’s about all I’ll say for that.  Y’all keep that in mind.”

The meeting was adjourned on a motion by Browder, seconded by Garrison.

Town Board Meeting

May saw the full resumption of hostilities in the on-going war within the Adamsville town board, with Mayor Tommy Morris accusing the town’s commissioners of “usurping the charter” and telling the board that “the next time this happens I’m going to sock you with a charge on malfeasance and misfeasance.”  Town Attorney Ken Seaton spoke at length, generally supporting the mayor’s complaint, and the commissioners were largely subdued, except for Dwana Garrison, who supplemented her accustomed belligerence with some childish mockery.

* * * 

These hostilities broke out more than an hour and twenty minutes into another marathon session, which began smoothly enough with the unanimous approval of the minutes (on a motion by Frank Lacey, seconded by Mike Norris), the financial report (on a motion by Garrison, seconded by Lacey), and of the remaining reports (on a motion by Lacey, seconded by Norris).

Garrison provided an update “about the Festival coming up.  Most all of you know it’s this week.  We are in full swing.  We already have people in from all over the United States, and also from Canada, that are in here with us.  Want to invite everybody out Saturday morning for the opening ceremonies.  That’s at 11:00 a.m.  The sheriff that has won the award this year is Sheriff Joe Arpaio from Arizona.  Didn’t realize what a big celebrity he was until all this took place, and CNN and Fox News got excited.  Bill [Police Chief Bill McCall] had nominated him.  He is the sheriff who makes the jail mates sleep in tents, called tent city, and wear pink boxer shorts.  And it should be really big.  We’ve got things lined up.  We have a new carnival we’ve never had before, and it looks fantastic up there.  They’re already up there and setting up.  We got the fireworks location changed.  It should be, thought, still a great fireworks show.  Talent contest.  Terry’s head of the ‘fifties and ‘sixties music.  Because of graduation, Frank and I and some others have Thursday night with our seniors, and also Mayor Seaton, I mean, excuse me, Judge Seaton, I’m sorry, has, will have a big talent show on Friday night.  Saturday we have a parade.  There are no four-wheelers allowed in it, no horses allowed in it, no motorcycles, unless it is ridden by police officers.  It will be a very slow parade, led by police officers and all the way through it, mostly beauty queen winners, politicians, and we do have a float this year.  The parade, the floats, Adamsville Elementary School went to the Humboldt parade and won best out-of-town float first prize, and we’re excited to know that we’re going to have a float in our parade.  And it was called “Walking Tall Through Berryland.”  So, that’s going to take place, and we hope to have lots of people in and spend lots and lots of money with us.  And I just wanted to bring that up, Mayor, since that was under the reports, the Home and Museum, we look to, hopefully, sell quite a few things.   I know Rene and her staff will do that.  And one other thing.  We had a large, we had a very nice donation made today at the museum by this couple here from Ontario, Canada.  [Jim and Maria Hebbard, from Brampton, Ontario.]  They have put in a rose garden in the front of the home where we had some unsightly bushes and it was needing something terribly bad done.  And they spent the money, and Sheryl and them are over there and planting it, and the rose garden is Pauline Pusser Memorial Rose Garden, and they have bought some gorgeous bushes to plant there, and I want to say a very special thank you to you two for doing that.  It’s very nice of you.  And they’re from Canada.”

* * * 

Moving on to old business, Mayor Morris called on City Administrator Terry Thrasher for a report on “Long Range Plan Cost.”

“We just got this in,” Thrasher said, holding up some documents, “and I didn’t copy it because we hadn’t, it’s the rough draft.  But MTAS run a survey for us.  Kind of similar to what we’re trying to get the engineering firms to for us, which we talked about last month.  But MTAS has had this under study for the past several weeks, and they finished it up late last Friday.  Came down and brought it to me, and gave us some preliminary cost figures, their estimation of what we can do to get a leg up on our water and waste water program.  And it really wasn’t as bad as I thought it was.  I was very shocked that they couldn’t find a way to spend more money than they did.  But, they’re talking about the water tank improvement, which I think we’ve got an engineering group here to talk about that anyway, and replacement of some pumping systems and this, you know, rough figures, but they also went over our financials up through the year 2007 and they called me and said, ‘You’ve got a lot of money.  Where’d you get it?’  I said, well, we don’t have a lot, but we’ve got everything going our way.  But our interest income was up nicely, and our bonds are retiring very well, and they think we’ll be in a great position if need to, which we probably will, to go to rural development and get grant loan program to do the long-term stuff that you guys have been talking about, which is the replacement of old water lines.  That’s going to be the most expensive thing.  We’ve started a—[Turns to Paul Wallace Plunk of the utility department]—I don’t guess you’ve started the smoke testing of the sewer system yet.  But we’ve got, that’s part of their study, part of their recommendation, that we smoke test our sewer system.  But we’re talking about, about $675,000.  Would do a lot for us.  Probably put our sewer pond, with a 300,000 over, in other words we’d have a 300,000 more in gallons of capacity if we did that.”

Responding to a question from Jeff Browder, Thrasher said that the $675,000 was for water and waste water combined, and Morris observed that “Where prices are now, that won’t go far.”

“This would be the long range plan?” Norris asked.

“This will do—” Thrasher began.  “It will not replace water lines like the one down Main Street needs replacing, and some of these old cast iron metal lines that Tommy’s told you about being in the ground for, what, Tommy?  Forty years?”

“Well,” Norris said, “why don’t you write us up a report and get it to us—”

“I will,” Thrasher said.

“—we could sit here and talk all night,” Norris concluded, which was nearly prophetic, given how long the meeting actually lasted.

“Well,” Thrasher added, referring to the report, “this is boiler plate.  We can do it.  We can afford to do it, and it’s not going to affect us much.  The one that we’re, that engineering companies give a study on, is the one where we have to replace water lines.”

“So,” Lacey asked, “what is, I mean, how valid or accurate is that report, and that price?”

“Very,” Thrasher replied.  “The accuracy has got to be within ten percent of the cost.”

“Is this what Paul Wallace was supposed to be doing,” Norris asked, “or are—”

“Part of it,” Thrasher answered.  “He gave them a lot of the figures that they used to come up with this.”

“Well,” Norris asked, “are we finished with it now, Paul Wallace?  Have you got more to do, or what?”

“No,” Plunk replied, “there’s some more we can do.”

Thrasher added, “When the engineering firms start talking to us about the long plan, we’ll have to do some more figures for them, too.”

“But after this right here,” Lacey asked, “will we be able to supply the needs for any increased industry in our industrial park?”

“Yeah,” Thrasher responded, “I’d think this would help.”

“And to subdivisions from around, water—” Lacey began.

“Yeah,” Thrasher continued, “because we’re talking about another 200, 250,000 gallon tank?”  Thrasher looked toward Barge Wagner representative Shannon Cotter for clarification of the tank size, then he continued. “Two hundred and fifty thousand more storage, which will help us, will fix our state problem.  And it would give better pressure in quite a few lines.  So, yeah, that’s—”

Norris interrupted: “How does this figure in relation to the grant that we already have?”

“Well, that is one of the grants,” Thrasher replied, turning again to Cotter, who confirmed it.  “That’s the CDBG grant we applied for, we got that for the water tank.”

“But,” Browder said, joining the discussion, “that’s not a grant to meet any pressure problems or anything like that.  I mean, you know—”

“I think it will help the pressure,” Thrasher interjected.

“Of course,” Browder continued, “I realize it’s a bad thing to live outside the city limits, but when I did, I lived on a road that had a two-inch water pipe.  And I don’t care how hard you press it, you’re not going to get but so much water into a two-inch water pipe.  And when you build the next eight or ten homes on that road, and everybody gets up in the morning and getting ready to go to work, I saw a pretty good fluctuation in water.  Now I’m not going to say we’ve got a lot of that, but I know I did, and I know we have it in spots.  But, that’s, are we talking about doing some work on that—”

“Well,” Thrasher responded, “a lot of this work is places where a line goes to here, and skips a mile and a half and comes from the other way.  We’ve got a lot of deadheads.  We don’t like deadheads because of the stale water and the pressure.  That would fix a lot of those.”

“But I guess I,” Lacey said, “I guess our main concern, or what we have talked about was, we were wanting to be sure our fire ratings would stay the same, or improve some, after these improvements, and we would be able to supply any number of industries or homes, or, if we have two fires at the same time, be able to put them out without any question.  And this right here you’re saying will—”

“Well, trying to give you a percentage of what that part—” Thrasher began, then he turned to Plunk and asked, “What will that fix?  A third of the problem?”  After some cross talk, Thrasher said “I’d say it’s done twenty-five to thirty-five percent of our problems, this would alleviate.  But the other 65% is going to take the replacement of water lines.”

Plunk opined that “The only way you’re going to fix your problem with, your fire rating, you’re going to have to do like Hardin County.  You’re going to have to go to a dump system.  That’s the only way you can do it.  They did it, and they’ve lowered their rating two points.  That’s just a big plastic dump bin out here, but you’ve got a truck running to it all time to put water in it.  You don’t have to have that high a pressure off of the fire plugs if you’re using the dump tanks.”

“Is that a costly situation?” Norris asked, and when Thrasher responded “No” and Plunk “I don’t think so,” Norris asked, “Why don’t we do it?”

“We’ll need to look into it,” Garrison agreed.

“We don’t need it here in town, do we?” Mayor Morris asked, setting off further discussion of in-town water requirements.

 “A dump tank,” Thrasher said, “for a municipality, is not going to help change the ISO rating a whole lot.  What they’re going to want to do, is they go to the elementary school and the high school and the nursing homes and places like that.  And they want to have a certain gallon-per-minute flow.  The bigger the industry, or the bigger the building and the more people in it, they want more flow.  So, dump tanks don’t get you flow out of the fireplug.  If I’ve got two fire trucks pumping two attack lines, I’m looking at 400 gallons per minute minimum, and a fireplug will produce 500 gallons a minute.  So you can just barely fill the truck up and get it in the dump tank.  The dump tank is a short way to get around the problem, which is not having enough water flow, which was what I was saying.  All the line that was replaced when they widened 64 east and west, they changed some of that line.”

“If we’re fixing to redo downtown,” Lacey remarked, “I would hate to redo downtown and then come back in two years later.”

Thrasher pointed out that “You won’t tear it up.  You’ll abandon that line.  What we’ll do is pick a spot out, somewhere down in here, tap it, go north, go west, and go around that.  We’re not going to dig that line, we’re just going to abandon it.”

“Probably tap it in two or three different places,” Morris added.

“Now,” Lacey continued, “I think that’s what, I mean, the way I understand it, what I would like to see us do, is get a price to give us a 100% bid.  A 100% fix.  Even if we’re not able to do it, we’ll at least know this is what we’ve got to do—”

“We’ve got a plan,” Norris interjected.  “That’s what we were asking for—”

Lacey continued: “—to go forward, because right now we can’t think ahead for the worries that are behind us.”

“Well,” Thrasher replied, “the engineers that we’re asking to come in and give us bids are going to take it from the step that this MTAS took us, into the next, probably, 15-20 years.  So, how much money do you want to borrow, and how quick do you want to pay it back?”

“Right now,” Lacey replied, “we don’t want to borrow any.  We just want to look and see what we’ve got to look at.”

“Well,” Norris asked, “when are we going to get something back from the engineers?”

“Hopefully,” Thrasher replied, “by next meeting I’ll have some numbers for you.”

“And I guess from those engineers,” Browder said, “if we don’t already, we probably need to ask for a percent of increase by year.  You’re looking at something, $674,000 this year, and it’s going to be five years out when you do it, then you’re probably looking at a million.”  Turning to Barge Wagner representative Bryant Bondurant, he asked “Do you automatically figure that in when you do something like that?”

“You can figure inflation.” Bondurant replied.  “It’s a hard guess—”

“Yeah.  Sure,” Browder agreed.

Bondurant continued. “You can figure it in and make an estimate, but, man, especially the last few years, it’s real hard to do.”

* * * 

Looking at the agenda, Mayor Morris said “Let’s go to ‘Direct Deposit, Payroll.  Thrasher.’”

“We’ve checked on this,” Thrasher said, “talked about it, several of us have, and I’d like to recommend that the city go to direct deposit for the payroll.  We’ve got about thirty-seven, thirty-eight people.  It’s very time consuming, and we can probably do it cheaper, with the system we looked at last week through one of the local banks, and I think we ought to go to direct deposit.”

After nearly ten minutes of discussion about methods and procedures and employee concerns, the board voted unanimously (on a motion by Lacey, seconded by Norris) to adopt a direct-deposit payroll policy.

* * *

“New Business,” Mayor Morris said, referring again to the agenda.  “Paul wanted me to bring Barge Wagner up.  What does Barge Wagner want to tell us?”

Plunk explained that “they’re the ones that did the water study for us, about the CDBG grant on the water tank.  So, they’re here to explain that issue to us tonight.”

“Come right on up here and explain something to us,” Morris said, and Bondurant came to the front of the room.

“Well,” he began, “what we wanted to do in the study was determine where to put the water tank.  We knew we needed a water tank, and so that was the main purpose.  We got to look at the whole system, and that’s what we did during the study, and evaluated where the pressures were throughout the system and where would be the best place to put that tank.  And where our recommendation was, was at the end of Holmes Road.  Now, we met with Paul this afternoon, there’s a gentleman at Old Union Road and—”