Meridian City Hall

A year-long contract with Waggoner Engineering to help beef up staffing at the city’s freshwater and wastewater facilities left council members divided Tuesday as elected officials disagreed on how to move forward.

The council voted 3-2 to table the proposed contract that city administration says is needed to fill staffing gaps and train city workers to keep Meridian’s utilities operating smoothly. Councilmen Joe Norwood Jr., George Thomas and Dwayne Davis voted in favor of tabling the contract while Councilwomen Romande Walker and Ty Bell Lindsey voted against the motion.

Discussions about the contract first began in January following the retirement of longtime utilities supervisor Jimmy Eckman. Waggoner Engineering’s Scott Phillips and Public Works Director David Hodge told the council current employees did not have the training and expertise needed to keep the city’s two freshwater treatment plants operating smoothly.

The council in January authorized Waggoner to conduct a 30-day evaluation of the city’s staffing, resources and needs with the intention of bringing the engineering firm in for a longer period to help fill staffing gaps and train city workers.

Meridian, along with other municipalities, has struggled to attract and keep employees with the needed skills and certifications to operate the city’s water plants. Hodge has previously explained the city isn’t able to compete with private industry which offer significantly higher pay.

Mayor Jimmie Smith said Tuesday that the proposed contract will allow the city to use the expertise of Waggoner’s team to keep the city’s utilities operating smoothly, as well as train and recruit city employees to take over those roles when Waggoner staff leaves.

“They’re not here to take over,” he said. “They’re here to assist us with the severity of the problem we have.”

Davis, who made the motion to table the contract for future discussion at a work session, said he has questions about the contract that need to be answered before he is comfortable bringing it up for a vote. The contract, he said, doesn’t lay out how much Waggoner employees will be paid, and some of the positions being filled by Waggoner are also in the process of being filled by the city.

The city administration, Davis said, is manufacturing a crisis to pressure the council into approving a contract it doesn’t fully understand. The use of scare tactics, he said, undermine residents’ confidence in the city and make it sound like the water is unsafe to drink. That isn’t true, he said.

“What you’re doing is you’re putting up a scare tactic,” he said.

Walker said she supports moving forward with the contract because of the potential impact any issues with the water system will have on the community. The council previously discussed the contract for several hours in its Feb. 27 work session, she said, and it is now time to take action.

Without a working contract, Phillips said he will not be able to stay in Meridian to assist if problems occur. The workers brought in to help operate the city’s plants will also have to go if an agreement is not reached, he said.

“I’m going to go away until you want me back,” he said.

Smith said the council’s decision to table the contract was “ridiculous” and a disservice to the citizens of Meridian. The city needs Waggoner’s experts to make sure residents continue to have safe, clean drinking water, he said.

“What you all have done this morning is damnable because we could have come back, and we could of still discussed it, but we needed to have these folks in place to do what they need to do,” he said. “I don’t understand it. I really do not understand.”

Meridian’s freshwater system has repeatedly received high evaluations, and many of the staff who are responsible for those successes are still there, Norwood said. That the loss of one person can cause this level of disruption to the city’s utilities points to “horrible job of succession planning,” he said.

Regardless, Norwood said, the city’s workers kept the system operating before Waggoner came in, and they can keep it running for the two weeks until the next council meeting when the issue can come up for a vote again.