Parkersburg resident Rich Walters, center, speaks during the public forum of Tuesday’s Parkersburg City Council meeting. Walters asked council to delay action on a proposed pay raise for city employees until new members are seated in January, saying money needs to go toward addressing the area’s drug abuse problem.
PARKERSBURG, W.Va. — Though discussion was mostly calm, tensions flared a couple of times as Parkersburg City Council narrowly voted Tuesday to cut a proposed raise for municipal workers in half.
The 5 percent raise for all city employees excluding elected officials and appointed department heads was pitched by Mayor Jimmy Colombo in September using 2015-16 carryover funds was amended Tuesday on a 5-4 vote to make it 2.5 percent, with the rest of the money going to the stabilization fund, essentially the city’s rainy day fund.
The amended resolution and accompanying ordinance to fund it passed by the same 5-4 margin at Tuesday’s council meeting.
“Hell no,” Councilwoman Sharon Lynch said in voting against the first reading of an ordinance amending the city’s personnel policy and procedural manual to reflect the 2.5 percent raise. She was joined in dissenting by Councilwoman Nancy Wilcox, Councilman Jim Reed and Council President John Rockhold.
There were more than 100 people in council chambers for the meeting. After the amended resolution to revise the budget for the raise passed, a number of city workers filed out, at least one grumbling audibly about the decision.
Rockhold asked people to be quiet as they left so the meeting could continue. Councilman Mike Reynolds followed the workers into the hall, telling one man that if he was unsatisfied with the 2.5 percent raise, he could choose not to accept it.
“You don’t have to take it,” he said.
Colombo said he proposed the 5 percent raise not only because employees did not receive one during the previous fiscal year or the current budget but also due to his expectation that the minimum wage will soon be rising. Adjusting salaries now could lessen the impact later, he has said.
At the Oct. 25 council meeting, multiple people asked council to consider using at least a portion of the funds to address the area’s drug abuse problem. They renewed their call Tuesday, with some asking council to wait until January, when seven new council members will be seated, to allocate the $267,227 in question.
“It seems as if these new people (who) have been voted in are a little bit more willing to play ball with us,” Parkersburg resident Rich Walters said. “What is the urgency about pushing this through? People are dying in our town, and it’s not going to stop.”
Overdose deaths have continued to mount since the last council meeting, he said.
“Since that day, we’ve lost about 10 brothers and sisters,” Walters said.
The city needs to provide funding for drug programs and zoning for halfway houses, as well as have a rehabilitation facility, he said.
During his executive message, Colombo said he had spoken with multiple individuals about options for drug programs, including the executive director of Recovery Point of West Virginia, which announced plans earlier this year to establish a recovery facility at the former armory at 4200 Emerson Ave.
Multiple speakers said they were not suggesting city employees did not deserve a raise.
“You guys do deserve a raise,” said Parkersburg resident Donna Helmick, “but at the same time, if you guys (council and the administration) were serious about a raise, it would have been in the budget, not surplus.”
City street cleaning foreman Brian Lott said the elimination of employees’ longevity pay several years ago was a blow to morale and the proposed raise could help restore some of that.
“Not everybody, raises where they work can be protested or cut back,” he said.
Parkersburg resident Georgiana Atkinson said money for the raises and funding to address the drug epidemic were “apples and oranges.”
“We have a completed plan to reward the employees of the City of Parkersburg,” she said. “I’m not saying we don’t need to do the other plan. But it requires a lot more than you and I sitting here and talking about it for 45 minutes.”
Councilman Warren Bigley made the motion to cut the raise to 2.5 percent and put the rest in the stabilization fund. The same amendment failed 3-2 during a Finance Committee meeting last week, when Bigley said he offered it as a compromise since the full raise did not have enough votes to pass.
He added Tuesday that it would be premature to earmark the remaining funds, which is why he wanted to put them in stabilization.
“We don’t know what we would be earmarking it for,” he said.
Parkersburg firefighter/EMT Brad Dimit, president of International Association of Firefighters Local 91, said that since the money was not earmarked, the new council could still use it for raises.
“It’d’ve been nice to have the 5 percent, and all the employees deserved it, but we got 2.5 percent,”he said. “January, we’ll be back at it, trying to get that other 2.5 percent.”
Lynch said if employees had received a 2.5 percent raise this year and last year, it would equal 5 percent.
“I also know that without our firefighters and our police officers and their Narcan, we’d have more drug deaths,” she said.
Wilcox said the pay increases in 2014 caused some employees to have to pay more for insurance, effectively nullifying their raise. Council should do something to prevent that from happening again, she said.
Council approved by a 5-4 margin the addition of three positions: an executive administrative assistant for the mayor, a personnel/legal specialist and an assistant information technology technician. Wilcox, Councilmen Roger Brown and J.R. Carpenter and Councilwoman Kim Coram voted against it. The first reading of an ordinance to fund the positions passed 6-3, with Brown, Coram and Carpenter opposed.
The first reading of an ordinance transferring a half-acre property behind fire station No. 6 on Camden Avenue to the Wood County Building Commission passed 8-1, with Brown opposed. The property is the planned site of a training facility/burn building for the Wood County Firefighters Association, of which Parkersburg Fire Department is a member.