Whitfield to pay $125 an hour to fix city’s signs

Published 11:42 pm Friday, November 30, 2007

$125 an hour to clean and straighten street signs.

The Whitfield County Board of Commissioners is scheduled to vote on Monday on a contract with Dalton Paving and Construction that would pay the company that much to clean and straighten street signs in the city of Dalton and to count any signs or sign posts in the city that need to be replaced. Dalton Paving is the only company that submitted a bid for the contract.

The work would be performed for the city under the Local Option Sales Tax (LOST) agreement between the city and the county.

As part of that agreement, the county agreed to do requested public works projects for the city up to a set amount each year. City officials said they accepted the deal in return for taking a smaller share of the LOST than they had been prepared to ask for.

The 10-year agreement was negotiated in 2002 and took effect on Jan. 1, 2003. The deal called for the county to perform $1.8 million worth of projects that year. That increased each year based on the consumer price index. That means the deal calls for the county to perform $1.996 million worth of work for the city of Dalton this year.

But if the county can’t perform the work, it can contract it out and count the cost of the contract against the work promised the city.

“The (sign) work is planned to be accomplished by contract because the city wanted work started this year and the county crews are doing other projects,” said county administrator Robert McLeod.

But that claim left city officials scratching their heads.

“I would think they could find some employees or some community workers to do it,” said City Council member Bobby Grant.

The proposed contract calls for a three-man crew, one or two trucks and the materials and equipment needed to clean and straighten the signs.

City Council members at Friday’s public works committee meeting said $125 an hour seemed like a high fee for the work. Council members said it didn’t seem like “good stewardship” of taxpayer money to spend that much.

“But it’s not good stewardship to leave $300,000 on the table,” said Grant. That’s the gap between the amount of work by the county called for in the LOST agreement this year and the amount that is actually expected to be completed, according to city public works director Benny Dunn.

According to numbers provided by the city, the total shortfall for the first four years of the agreement, 2003-2006, was $815,215. That’s about 11 percent of the total promised over the four-year period.

Council members said the amount of the sign contract raised again one of their concerns about the LOST agreement. They say the county has little incentive to hold costs down on projects performed for the city.

That’s a charge rejected by Whitfield County Board of Commissioners chairman Brian Anderson.

“We are smart enough people that we have the incentive to do what is right regardless of how anything is structured,” Anderson said.

Anderson said Friday he had not had a chance to look at the sign cleaning contract but he and other board members would review it over the weekend.

“If it looks like it is a frivolous bid or a frivolous contract, meaning that the people who would be awarded seem to be trying to milk the community, I would hope we would do something differently,” he said.

City officials say they first requested the signs be cleaned and straightened this summer, and they are concerned that the year is almost over and the work still has not been done.

“The county proposed doing a more comprehensive and lasting project that included resetting the poles deeper into the ground so they couldn’t be pushed over so easy, replacing poles that were damaged and replacing signs that were damaged. Through a series of meetings the city declined to accept the county detailed work plan,” said McLeod.

But city officials recalled being asked for more detailed plans than they thought necessary.

“What do you consider straight?” Grant recalled one commissioner asking him.

Dunn said in response to county concerns he put together two pages of specifications for the sign cleaning request.

In fact, city officials complain that the county is trying to require much more detailed plans for many of the projects than the agreement calls for.

But Anderson said there’s a reason why the county wants detailed plans. “We had some issues early on this year where we would do work based on a handshake, a general concept, maybe even a partial plan, and we’d get calls left and right that the sidewalk wasn’t high enough or the curve was too sharp or the asphalt was too deep,” Anderson said.

“If you want us to spend $1 million on a road project, we feel architectural plans are not asking too much,” he added.

Anderson said that despite those concerns the county’s intent is to live up to the LOST agreement and perform requested projects in a timely manner.

“I think there’s room to work on both sides, and I hope we can do that,” said City Council member Dick Lowrey, who chairs the city’s public works committee.

“We are one community, and we need to work together. I’m afraid personally this agreement we have doesn’t help. It’s really difficult to work through the thing without one side or the other feeling they have been taken advantage of,” he said.