Othello council approves Public Works lead, hears suggested water rates

OTHELLO — The Othello City Council meeting Monday featured both a presentation by consultants FCS Group on Othello’s water rates and the approval of a memorandum of understanding between the city and the International Union of Operating Engineers on a new lead position at Othello Public Works.

The memorandum of understanding passed four to two, with council members Corey Everett and Mark Snyder voting nay.

Mayor Shawn Logan introduced the memorandum of understanding.

“The Public Works Department met with the Water, Sewer, and Street Committee and agreed to a new lead within the Public Works Department,” Logan said. “The new lead will not create a new employee within the department, and the title for the new lead in Public Works is going to be Maintenance Worker Lead, Building Maintenance position.”

The city previously signed a contract with the Public Works Union that would see leads in each department of Public Works. The new lead would be responsible for facilitating the maintenance of buildings owned and operated by the city.

“The impact on the city budget is; according to the union contract lead positions are paid an additional $5000 per year above the current salary,” Logan said. “This was recommended by the City Council Committee and by the Public Works Department, and they intend to promote somebody from within.”

Upon finding out that multiple employees in Public Works held two lead positions (doubling the addition to their salary), Everett expressed concern that providing a $10,000 addition to one person’s salary to cover two lead positions would lead to poorer performance from that individual for both lead positions.

Garza said that it doesn’t matter if the worker has two lead positions, so long as they can perform both adequately, and that the department isn’t large enough that an employee can’t perform two lead functions.

“If there's not a lot for him to do either, he can accomplish those tasks,” Garza said. “Because we're not to where we have 100 employees in the department.”

Snyder asked why Public Works Director Curt Carpenter couldn’t continue to perform the tasks that the new lead position would be responsible for.

Lallas said Carpenter is responsible for all of Public Works.

“The parks, the water, the sewer, the streets, he owns it all, it all comes under him,” Lallas said. “He wants people in positions that he can give the responsibility to, to give him the accountability that he needs. That's all it is, and we agreed to it in the contract. The (Water, Sewer and Street) committee was for it.”

Everett expressed further concerns about the new lead position.

“It's getting out of hand,” Everett said. “We don't have 100 employees here. You know, if we had 100 employees, absolutely, but the leads, it's just getting out of hand.”

Logan responded to Everett’s comment.

“I understand,” he said. “However, this is the direction that we were given in the negotiation by the council and what the council voted on when we approved the union contract, and this was the overall long-term goal that the city council wanted to see.”

Before the approval of the new public works lead, Project Manager Brooke Tacia of FCS Group gave an informational presentation to the council regarding the consultant’s recommendations for city water utility costs.

Tacia said that the objective of the presentation was to show whether the city of Othello can hold to the water utility financial forecast of 2.25% water rate increases annually through 2028 that FCS previously provided.

“So looking into 2024 and beyond, really despite the volatile inflationary environment that we've seen over the last couple of years the city has done really well about managing expenses and tracking revenues and is able to hold that previously forecasted rate path,” Tacia said.

After presenting the data, Tacia provided FCS’s recommendation for adjusting the water rates to account for how much cost each class, industrial and residential, is providing to the overall revenue. According to the presentation, the residential class is currently imbalanced against residential class users.

“In terms of next steps here,” Tacia said, “the recommendation of this presentation is to implement the revenue requirements strategy of 2.25% annual revenue increases through 2028 based on the cost of service phase-in plan that would see retail rates held flat through 2026 and industrial rates increasing about 6.9%. Rates would then return to (2.25%) across the board … from 2027 to 28.”

Logan said the council would meet with the Water, Sewer and Street Committee to discuss the city’s next steps based on FCS’s recommendations.

Gabriel Davis may be reached at gdavis@columbiabasinherald.com.