By John Brice
Correspondent
The LaFayette City Council met on Tuesday, April 11th of 2023 at the Chambers County Farmers Federation Agricultural Center at the ALFA building in LaFayette. In attendance were Mayor Kenneth Vines, Councilman Terry G. Mangram, Councilman David Ennis, Councilman Toney B. Thomas, and Councilman Michael C. Ellis. Police Chief George Rampey, Street, Sanitation and Cemetery Superintendent George Green, City Clerk Louis T. Davidson and City Attorney Joseph M. Tucker were also present. The meeting began with an invocation led by Chief Rampey and standard procedures such as roll call.
Starting off the meeting were the approval of proclamations for the Fair Housing Month in April and Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Mrs. DeAnna Hand, LaFayette Main Street Executive Director, then took to the podium for the reading and acceptance of a proclamation from Governor Kay Ivey regarding LaFayette’s official designation as one of Alabama’s Main Street communities. Hand thanked the LaFayette Main Street volunteers for their energy and passion after which the council voted to approve the proclamation.
Mrs. Willie Nell Finley took to the podium next for a Handy Cemetery Discussion regarding an issue with her late husband Charles Finley’s recent burial there. Assertions were made by Mrs. Finley that Superintendent Green had placed her husband in the wrong burial plot. Dates and events were recounted by Mrs. Finley forming a timeline that included her husband’s passing on February 21st, making funeral arrangements with Darryl Seroyer of Silmon – Seroyer Funeral Home on February 22nd as well as a meeting at the cemetery with Green to select a plot on that same day.
Finley stated “When we buried my husband on Monday, February 27th I was not in a state of mind to notice that the plot was wrong all I knew I was sitting at my husband’s casket. When I got myself together enough to go out to the cemetery on Saturday I immediately realized that he was not in the plot we selected, I became very emotional and went back to my yard and called Mr. Green from my car to tell him that he had marked the wrong plot.”
Mrs. Finley went on to further remark “He was very rude in his response and stated you all should have gone back out there. I told him that we did, we went back two times and he still had not marked the plot. In me trying to talk with him about marking the wrong plot, he told me that he didn’t have time to wait on Mr. Seroyer because Ms. Diane and council would be questioning him about payment.
My response was ‘George, I didn’t have to wait on Mr. Seroyer to close I told you I could have gone to city hall to take care of the matter but you told me not to worry about it and go ahead with arrangements with Mr. Seroyer and now you are telling me something about Ms. Diane and council getting on to you about a payment.’ Besides being rude, that conversation was very unprofessional, he was not empathetic, he expressed no emotion and did not take any responsibility in the matter and just kept saying we should have gone back to the cemetery as if to say it is your fault.”
Finley concluded by stating that her goal was to receive clarification of how this error was made by Green and assurances from the city that procedural changes would be put in place going forward to ensure that such a mistake was not made again in the future.
Superintendent Green took to the podium to provide his side of the story and contest some of the claims made by Mrs. Finley. Green asserted that he has always conducted himself in a professional manner and insisted that the entire situation was merely a misunderstanding due to a breakdown in communications. Mayor Vines and the council agreed that a meeting of the Cemetery Committee should be scheduled to consider updating policies and procedures to prevent such an incident from occurring again.
Taking to the podium next was Mr. Kerry Towles, chairman of the city’s Parks and Recreation Department with an update on the damage to athletic equipment caused by the elements used by youth sporting leagues that are stored on city property. It was agreed by the council that new equipment should be purchased and new arrangements made to safely store it to avoid it being damaged by mold and mildew.
Allen Tucker from Harmon Engineering & Contracting Co., Inc. was up next to provide a water outage recap and update on the work being done to repair the city’s water system in the aftermath of severe flooding caused by heavy rain in the last week of March. Tucker explained that as of that time the regular water line was back up and running and the county road was being backfilled and repaired.
Extensive pipe damage requires long term repair meaning that the water flow is still diminished and heavy rains in the future will cause serious issues. Repairs on the spillway need to be completed urgently, the design is nearly worked out and repair costs are being calculated. New and better spillway systems are needed and it is impossible to restore the previous design, however, a new design makes recurrence of such damage in the future highly unlikely. The critical path is the main pipe which the county has already bid on pricing for so the city does not need to place the order for it, streamlining the process for its procurement.
Attorney Tucker clarified that these areas in need of repair were underwater in the storm’s immediate aftermath and not included in the city’s state of emergency declaration which means that this additional damage needs to be inserted into an amended declaration.
It was emphasized by Attorney Tucker that this aspect of the repair can’t be delayed or a potential catastrophe could take place should heavy rainfall reoccur. Voting was needed to approve the pipe purchase so that it could be ordered the following morning, which was approved with a roll call vote along with a 2nd motion to extend the state of emergency declaration to 3/29 for the additional damage that had been later discovered.
There was further clarification from Attorney Tucker that the emergency water conservation plan that had been voted on to enact limited voluntary water use in the city’s emergency utility meeting after the storm hadn’t been published in a newspaper so it had not technically achieved official status at any point, a roll call vote subsequently approved the rescinding of that plan.
Clerk Davidson next took to the podium to address the reappointment of Darryl Seroyer so that he can continue to serve on the Chambers County Board of Equalization which was approved by a roll call vote. Further discussions included setting guidelines for the reservation of the city’s parks by members of the public and potential reimbursement to the City of Camp Hill for law enforcement training that they had provided for a police officer that later transferred from their police department to the LPD. Notice was given that LaFayette Day had been rescheduled for May 20th due to inclement weather on its date that had been originally set.
Roll call votes were taken to approve the authorization of Sean Duke as a proxy to vote on behalf of the city for the Alabama Municipal Insurance Corporation as well as Alabama Municipal Insurance Corporation Voting Delegates for the Annual Business Meeting at the Alabama League Convention in case nobody from the city can attend. At that point the council entered into executive session and members of the public exited the building.