By Charles Oliver
Dalton Daily Citizen
May 10, 2008 10:08 pm
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Dalton City Council members say they still plan to cut the size of their road department. But some council members say the cuts may not be as deep or as quick as those called for in a plan to merge their department with the Whitfield County road department and to contract out the vast majority of road work.
The City Council approved 4-0 a resolution calling for such a merger Monday. But the Whitfield County Board of Commissioners surprised city officials by approving an alternative resolution calling for a third party study of such a merger.
“We’re going out of the street and road business this month. We know that it affects lives. We hate that,” said Mayor David Pennington. “But from a taxpayers’ standpoint, we’ve got to get as efficient as we possibly can. We are going ahead with our end of it.”
But some other council members said that timetable might be little aggressive.
“That was a little tight of a schedule even when we were working with the county,” said council member Denise Wood.
“I don’t know if we can do it by the end of the month,” said council member George Sadosuk. “But it won’t be far off.”
And unlike in the original plan, the city may not leave the road business completely.
“Considering that the county, under our current (Local Option Sales Tax) agreement is doing our paving for us and considering that we still hope to move in the direction of the resolution that we passed, we feel it is better that we move in the direction of getting out of the paving business. That’s not to say we’ll get out of the maintenance business,” said council member Dick Lowrey, chairman of the city’s public works committee.
“The council has looked at it, and we agree with the mayor. This (paving) is a business we don’t need to be in,” said Sadosuk.
When council members first broached the merger plan, they said 25 to 30 city public works employees could lose their jobs. The job losses under the revised plan could be less, but no one is quite sure how large they will be.
“I think that would cut the number down some. In the original discussion, we were talking about the county maintaining a crew to do that. But if we are not going to get that for a while, we’ve got to be responsible for that maintenance work,” Lowrey said.
Some commissioners said they are still very interested in merging the two departments.
“What was supposed to happen Monday night happened in that a letter of intent was signed,” said board chairman Brian Anderson. “The language was a little different because of the different perspective each body was coming from. But we are all in agreement we should move forward.”
Anderson said the county, which would be responsible for maintaining roads under the original plan, needs to know exactly what that job will involve.
“All we have said is we want to look at the road inventory list, the scoring of those roads and calculate — as you merge the two sets of books — what’s going to be the maintenance costs for year one and out,” he said.
Commissioner Leo Whaley said he still wants to merge the two departments before his term ends at the end of the year.
“But we’ve got to have more understanding about the financing,” he said.
Whaley said the city’s plans to reduce its road department will not affect the county’s decision.
“They can do their own thing, but we aren’t going by their timetable. This is a big step, and I want to understand it more,” he said.
More mergers in the future?
The two governments have also been discussing merging their building inspector’s offices.
Lowrey said those talks “kind of got put on the back burner” because of the focus on merging the road departments.
Sadosuk agrees.
“Roads seemed like a more important issue, so that’s where we began to focus,” he said.
But Whaley said there are fewer issues in merging the two building inspector’s departments.
“We ought to move on that. We can do that easier than public works right now,” he said.
Roads and building inspection are the only two departments the two governments are currently discussing merging, say commissioners and council members. But some officials say if they can get them taken care of, there might be more mergers in the future.
“Recreation would be the one that I would move on next,” said Whaley.
Pennington said he’d like to look at all departments.
“The fire departments certainly need to be looked at. Now that we have water all through the county, there’s no reason the fire departments couldn’t be combined,” he said.
Anderson noted that the city and county now work together in around two dozen areas, from the landfill to the library to the trade center.
“Roads and the building department would really be areas 26 and 27,” he said. “Not every community in Georgia has a combined 911 department, for instance.”
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