Pay talk raises questions in Garland

Last week’s Garland Board of Commissioners meeting saw more than just discussion about the 2024-25 fiscal year budget. Talk of pay hikes also stirred emotions.

Tensions that were low for most of the night between both members of the board and town residents suddenly ignited as commissioners started going over pay increases for three town employees.

The first disagreement happened when talking about raising Town Clerk Shauna’ Harper’s salary to $50,000 a year.

Commissioner Jo Strickland asked what qualifications Harper had, noting that the Salemburg town clerk had full training and had taken multiple classes, which is why that position was paid $52,000 a year.

Harper replied that she had taken one clerical class, but no one had trained her for the job she was doing, and, she said, there were no complaints about her job performance.

At this point, Winifred Murphy, a resident of Garland and the town’s former mayor, said there were complaints.

Since the board was no longer in the public comment section, after members voted 3-2 not to open the floor, Murphy was not allowed to speak. That didn’t stop her from trying to make a few comments, but she was quickly told to sit down.

The board voted 3-2 to raise Harper’s salary with Strickland and Smith casting the dissenting votes.

The board did not settle down during the next two talks about raises for the public works employees. The commissioners got into arguments about how long the employees had been working there, saying these pay raises usually came after two years of employment with the town.

Commissioner Lee Carberry said the raises needed to happen if they wanted to retain employees.

“If you want to keep people here, you have to pay them to stay. He’s got people that will work now,” Commissioner Carberry stressed.

Commissioner Ralph Smith Jr. countered that he didn’t know anything about the employees, to which fellow board member Timothy Blackburn stated that they just had to “get out and look. Get out and help him.”

The other issue that was brought up was one employee getting a higher raise than the other when he had only been there for a month longer.

This conversation once again turned into talk that the commissioners needed to get out and help the public works employees instead of complaining about their pay raises.

In the end, the board voted 3-2 for the pay increases for the two employees. Strickland and Smith, again, cast the dissenting votes.

Updating the town Code of Ordinance

Kimberly Moffett from the Mid-Carolina Regional Council joined Tuesday night’s meeting to talk to the board about Ordinance #2024-07-01, which would update the town’s Code of Ordinance.

Moffett explained that she had come to the board about a year and three months ago to talk to them about the updates since none had been done in many years.

“We talked about updating the Code of Ordinance because (it) had not been updated since 2005,” she said in her opening remarks to the board and residents gathered at the meeting.

Moffett added that she had been unable to find all of the ordinances that Garland had adopted in the town’s ordinance book, and instead had to go through 19 years of minutes of town board meetings to find what changes the town had made.

“I had to read through 19 years of minutes. Going through that, I found lots of changes that were made. Some of them I could find the paperwork for and the documentation, many of them, I cannot,” she told the board.

But she complied what she could to create Ordinance #2024-07-01 that had all of the “language” that she was able to find, and suggestions she made to change the town’s ordinances.

Some of these suggestions were small things like changing “treasurer” to finance officer, updating the terms for the mayor, updating when the meeting times were since they changed from 7:30 p.m., updating what the agenda for the meetings should look like based on what they were doing now, and other things.

But she said there was still some missing information.

“There are several other questions that I have,” she told the board. “Some missing information, I’ll just go over those quickly with you in case anybody has any idea where I might be able to find that information. Or maybe it’s in somebody’s brain locked away somewhere … that would be great.”

The missing information included amending the curfew section, a sewer grease ordinance, backflow and cross connections, filling of pools, an uncompleted smoking ordinance, a Sunday beer and wine ordinance that was brought up in 2012, golf carts, adopting animal control, a cell tower, business registration, police chief and abandoned vehicles, and nuisance control.

The commissioners were not sure where the information for those ordinances would be, but Smith pointed out that the golf cart ordinance was not needed due to state law making it clear that “it can’t operate on the highway without insurance” and that it has to be street legal.

Another ordinance discussed was the town’s fire code ordinance and fire limit ordinance. Moffett explained that neither of these ordinances has been updated since 1971, and that was something the town would have to do.

Commissioner Anothony Norris said the town just follows the county’s ordinances for anything fire-related. Moffett made a note of that and said they would need to find out when the county last updated their ordinance and then update Garland’s ordinance to reflect the same.

After listing everything about the new ordinance and the information that she was missing, Moffett said she would come back with an additional ordinance that would have the missing information, but the board could still vote on the ordinance that was presented that night.

“I will come back with an additional ordinance, but if you guys are good with that tonight, you should have a copy of 2024-07-01 in front of you, which will incorporate all the changes that we went over, and that will help us amend the ordinance,” she said. “And then what I will do is, once that is adopted, I’ll go in and make sure that everybody has a copy of that, and then moving forward, any time there’s an ordinance changing your code of ordinance, that will have to be done manually by whoever the clerk is.”

The board voted unanimously to adopt the new ordinance.

Finance officer

The town board also named the finance officer for the town. Members decided that Harper would hold that title with Mayor Austin Brown named as deputy finance officer.