County wrangles over tree service costs

Published 10:57 pm Wednesday, July 30, 2014

The Cullman County Commission didn’t get very far into its regular meeting Tuesday before the wrangling started, with commissioners disagreeing almost as soon as the 35 people in attendance had found their seats.

After a verbal caveat from associate commissioner Doug Williams—who, along with associate commissioner Wayne Willingham, is a defendant in a lawsuit over the county’s six week-old water cooperative—the commission approved the minutes of the last regular meeting.

Williams, whose statements from the minutes of the April 27 commission meeting have factored into a circuit judge’s decision to temporarily suspend the powers of the cooperative he and Willingham created, noted during the session that the meeting minutes from the commission’s May 20 meeting “are not a true and accurate copy of everything that goes on, and never have been,” before voting, nonetheless, to approve them without change.

Then came another routine, but crucial, chore: paying the county’s bills. Part of that job involves the commission approving invoices from the preceding period—typically two weeks—since the last commission meeting.

One invoice, said Williams, stood out—an invoice for work done not only in recent weeks, but over the past nine months, by Marshall’s Tree Service of Hanceville at Smith Lake Park, Stoney Lonesome OHV Park and various other locations throughout the county. The collective tally billed to the tree service over that period is $308,655.

Of that amount, county billing records show that $53,830 was paid for work done at the OHV park through federal grant money awarded by the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs (ADECA). The ADECA grant, which totals more than $2 million, was awarded to help fund the initial construction of the OHV park.

According to Graves, there is still approximately $130,000 of unspent ADECA grant money that can still be applied to upcoming tree and brush clearing work at the park.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Williams asked to approve the invoices with the exception of the tree service charges, which is something the commission cannot do without recessing the meeting and agreeing to move forward with its financial obligations before conducting further business. After being notified of this by county attorney Dan Willingham, Williams pledged to look into the tree service invoices over the next 10 days before the commission meets again. All three commissioners then approved all invoices, including the tree service charges.

The commission approved the one-year bid to Marshall’s Tree Service in November of 2009, renewing a bid it had awarded the company in the spring of that same year. At the November meeting, Williams had made the motion to award the bid, and the measure had passed unanimously.

The bid itself is structured to pay for tree work done on a per-job basis, and not in a lump sum. For tree topping, Marshall’s receives $20 per tree; for tree trimming, the fee is $50 per tree. Tree removal costs the county $70 per tree. The lone competitor for the November 2009 bid had been Burks Tree Service of Hanceville, which quoted per-tree services for tree topping at $25; tree trimming at $60 and tree removal at $60.

When, during the public comments portion of the May 20 meeting, some residents had approached the commission with concerns about the extent of work authorized to the tree service, commission chairman James Graves simultaneously took responsibility for monitoring and authorizing the tree service expenditures on an as-needed basis, and defended the amount of work he had approved.

Graves, in a followup interview Tuesday, again justified the work that had been done since the bid was awarded.

“It’s a legitimate contract, like so many others that we bid out for work to be done over the course of a year or what have you,” said Graves. “And I feel that keeping track of it is my responsibility, because by legislative act, I’m over the budget and finances of the county.

“But,” he continued, “it’s legitimate, the work they are doing. Out in Bremen, we have trees; brush; vines. All around that welcome center [at the OHV park], it’s nothing but a snake haven that you’ve got to clear up and get out of there before you get the public to come into that facility, or you’re going to wind up getting somebody hurt down there.”

The tree cleanup at the OHV park is part of the county’s effort to ready an environmental center building—also funded through the ADECA grant—that will afford visitors a place to receive safety instruction and other training prior to using the OHV trails.

For the time being, Williams said he will look at the expenditures at OHV and for other services billed by Marshall’s Tree Service—“things that were brought to me by several constituents,” he said—and weigh whether the commission should continue approving cleanup and debris removal work at its current pace.

The county commission next meets on June 24 at 10 a.m.

For complete coverage of the other commission business conducted at Tuesday’s meeting, see Thursday’s edition of The Cullman Times.

‰Benjamin Bullard can be reached by e-mail at bbullard@cullmantimes.com or by telephone at 734-2131 ext. 270.