City positions may stay frozen


The FAIR Committee decided to revisit the issue of unfreezing budgeted and unbudgeted city positions at a meeting held on Monday, April 24.

The extraordinary meeting was held at 6:30 p.m., just before the City Council’s regular meeting at 7:00 p.m.

FAIR Committee Chair Lynn Harper stated at the outset of the meeting that the reason she had called the meeting was because she believed that there had not been enough time to consider City Manager Jerry Moss’s recommendations.

The recommendations and the timelime for unfreezing the positions can be found in this memorandum that was circulated to FAIR Committee members during their meeting on April 19.

At the April 19 meeting, the committee had agreed to present Moss’s recommendations to the council and to advise the council to approve the recommendations.

“We don’t disagree with any part of it, we’d just like more time to think about it before we present it to the council,” she told the committee.

Harper also stated that Moss had not expected the committee to make a recommendation to the council.

FAIR Committee member Ranger Wilkerson asked if the School Resource Officer positions would be used to fill the open Police Officer positions. Harper responded that that was one of the questions that would require more clarification.

When asked by council member Elissa Yount how he was budgeting vis-a-vis the positions in question, Moss responded that he was budgeting while taking the positions into account.

The committee agreed to meet again on May 3 at 3:00 p.m.

After the meeting, Harper confirmed that the entire two-page memorandum was being reconsidered by the committee. The recommendation to remove the SROs from Henderson Middle School and Eaton-Johnson Middle School appears on the second page of that document.