City Council meeting sees storm-water assessment approved, police technology boost
Tuesday’s city council meeting was as busy as always, with councilmembers covering a wide range of topics ranging from storm-water infrastructure to police technology improvements and ethics committee appointments.
In the shining moment of the meeting, the nine members unanimously approved a resolution to fund a storm-water assessment and master plan — pushing the city toward much-needed infrastructure improvements.
“This is a starting point,” said Councilmember Marda Wallace, who has been “pushing for the plan” for a long time. “We have so many places that are flooding. This is a fabulous start. And I’m really excited to see it come to life.”
The assessment plan, presented by City Engineer Tom Wolf and Justin Avent of Gresham Smith, as well as Dusty Mays of Kimely-Horn, outlined a 12 to 18 month process that will see a thorough investigation of pipes, culverts, and drainage systems, along with flood plain and water inundation data over two sections of the city in east Jackson and the Bemis area.
A major portion of the study will be a comprehensive rating of the city’s existing storm-water infrastructure, which — until now — has never been studied.
The city as a whole has been suffering for years due to the unknown state of the storm-water infrastructure in the city, according to Mayor Scott Conger.
“We can talk about roads all day long,” Conger said, referencing the extensive paving project underway at across the city. “But the things underneath the roads, especially in the old areas of town, we don’t know what’s down there until it collapses. We want to be proactive and have a grading system so it doesn’t reach the point of collapse. And hopefully stop some flooding along the way.”
Once the study is complete, Conger says the data collected can be used to help reassess the entire city.
“We can look at what we need, what we need to address, and we can work out the kinks in a smaller area and scale it to the rest of the city,” he said.
The study will be funded through a mixture of American Rescue Plan funding and TDEC grants, costing the city only $932,000 as it receives $9.2 million.
More: American Rescue Plan funding finally inches forward
“This is going to be so thorough,” Wallace said. “They’re going to go through under the roads, they’re going to look at culverts, under pipes, they’re going to look at our watershed areas and see what’s not working anymore and what needs updating. This is truly going to help our infrastructure so much.”
Police see technology boost
Another notable improvement made at the June meeting was the unanimous passage of the resolution to allow the Jackson Police Department to contract the company Extra Duty Solutions to handle security requests.
Currently, Captain Robert Gambill of the JPD, as well as another officer, manage the system of allowing officers to work extra-duty by providing security at events throughout the city.
“This is going to be such a time saver,” Gambill said. “We manage this with a desktop and a phone right now. It’s about time we step up our technology and how we handle this.”
The contract will allow event organizers in the city to request the JPD’s service through Extra Duty Solutions, which will in turn relieve the JPD from having to manage vendor requests.
More: Pay raises for Jackson police, fire hope to address dire retention issues
Officers within the JPD can simply log on to the Extra Duty App and select the positions they want to staff.
“It’s going to be so great,” said JPD Chief Thom Corley. “It is so time consuming for staff to handle that. Every month we’re having to talk to vendors, sign up officers and do all these things. Now, basically (Extra Duty Solutions) will charge a fee to the companies that hire us to cover their costs — so nothing else changes for us. Our officers will still be able to do the same thing, it’ll just eliminate our officers from having to manage it.”
Ethics Committee appointments change
The appointees to the new Ethics Committee changed slightly from last week’s reporting and were unanimously approved at the city council meeting.
According to Conger, a mix-up in emails led to the confusion at last week’s agenda review meeting, where councilmembers expressed that they did not know where the list of appointees had come from, even though they were tasked with electing two of them.
“It was an email mix-up on my end,” Conger admitted at Tuesday’s meeting. “But it’s resolved now, and the council appointee’s were approved.”
Now serving on the board are: Mona Miller, Hunter Baker, Freeman McKindra, Carla Pollard, Joe Brasher, Daniele Hardee and Trunetta Atwater.
The wave of complaints spurred councilmembers to unanimously vote on second reading to replace sections 1-410 and 1-411 of the City Code of Ethics, which reduce the ease in which residents could previously make complaints, in an effort to enforce accountability.
Complaints against city employees will still go through the Ethical Advocate Portal, but complaints against elected officials will now go through the Ethics Committee — which will investigate the claims rather than present them immediately to the public.
Rules regarding how to file a complaint will change drastically as well. Previously, residents could anonymously fill out a complaint on the Ethical Advocate Portal. With the new changes enacted, complaints must be lodged with the Internal Auditor for the City of Jackson, who will then direct the questions and complaints to the Chairperson of the Ethics Committee.
Complaints will have to be handed in in-person, in writing, signed by the complainant, notarized, contain the complainant's legal name and mailing address and the names of those the complaint is against.
Document notarization does come at a fee.
Additionally, complaints against an elected official, or anyone running for election, will not be allowed “during the years in which the City holds municipal elections” — specifically, “from the last day on which a person may qualify as a candidate until after 11:59 p.m. of the following election day.”
These new rules are retroactively effective to Jan. 1, 2022, meaning they cover all five complaints currently filed against city council members.
Moving into budget season
As the weather heats up, so do money meetings among city officials, as the deadline for the next fiscal year’s budget looms closer.
Next Tuesday will see the first budget hearing for the year at city hall, and Conger believes the city is on a good, if detailed, track.
“I think one major difference in this year’s budget is that we’re working through our salary and compensation study, we’re trying to nail down time for our consultants to come meet with our department heads, because we want to have that process understood by everyone in the city,” he said. “If we can get that done before July, we can get that amended to the budget to the departments.”
Otherwise, Conger explains, the city is focusing on the same goal it has throughout his administration: pay down the debt.
“We’re utilizing our Georgia-Pacific land sale — we’re not borrowing any money,” he said. “We’re paying our debt down. So not a huge difference between this year and last year. We’re continuing to pay our debt down, we’re using the money that we have to pay for our capital and operating budget.
“We don’t want any more debt,” he said. “I think we’re on the right track.”
The special-called meeting will be conducted in city hall next Tuesday at 9 a.m.
Have a story to tell? Reach Angele Latham by email at alatham@gannett.com, by phone at 731-343-5212, or follow her on Twitter at @angele_latham.
This article originally appeared on Jackson Sun: Jackson Council approves storm-water assessment, police technology boost
