Arthur Hill Circle removed from waterline project | Lafollette | themountainpress.com

The LaFollette Utilities Board approved a second amendment of its interlocal agreement between Campbell County and LUB regarding the waterline project, with the only change being removing Arthur Hill Circle from the project, at its meeting on Monday night.

“We found out not long ago that that was removed from the project,” LUB General Manager Regina Kennedy said. “So there was no engineering done on it, so it had to be official on the interlocal agreement that that be removed from that.”

The pre-bid is Nov. 5, and the bid opening is Nov. 21, Kennedy said.

“So the agreement’s been amended for approval tonight to give Regina authority to sign it,” LUB attorney Kathy Parrott said. “That just removes Arthur Hill Circle. All of the households except for, I think, a couple had access through the backyards, the back of their property, as it went around. So they’re getting service, except for two, and because it was only two in that big stretch, it didn’t pass the feasibility study through the state. So the engineers cut it and had neglected to mention that because it wasn’t going to pass the feasibility study.”

The Campbell County Commission had already addressed the issue, approving the second amendment of the interlocal agreement as well, at its meeting on Oct. 21.

“The commission’s been made aware of that, and they’ve already passed the agreement,” Kennedy said.

The commission’s approval wasn’t without some fireworks.

“The motion fails to comply with Rule 16 of the commission rules and operating procedures, which require items to go before a committee,” Commissioner Zachary Marlow said.

Commissioner Rusty Orick made the motion to approve the amendment.

“This is something that we’ve drug through, and we’ve had so many different changes to this interlocal agreement,” Orick said. “And we’ve discussed this at length, and there wasn’t any reason to have a committee meeting, the waterline committee, because we discussed it last Monday night in the commission [workshop]. This interlocal agreement, which this makes the third time it’s been changed, and the reason it was changed this time was because of Arthur Hill Circle. It was accidentally removed from the list from the engineering. As far as I understand, what I’ve received today from Kathy Parrott, the attorney for LUB, and from Jeff Marlow, that this project is already in the paper, getting ready to start being bid. It has, I think, a day, November the 21st, when bids will be open. I think, if we keep dragging our feet on this, we’re probably going to kill the whole project. That’s my opinion. If somebody doesn’t understand where we’re at in the middle of the road, that’s where we’re at. The first interlocal agreement had some roads in it that we had taken out because of funding. That’s why the second one came about, and then all of a sudden, as soon as we passed it last month, we found out that Arthur Hill Circle is no longer in the play because engineering wasn’t done.”

Zach Marlow made a point of order regarding voting on the matter.

“I know you’ve got to make a ruling on the point of order,” Orick said. “I think if I’m not mistaken, there’s other terms that we’ve actually had to do without having committee meetings, and if that’s going to stop our process from flowing through this county, I’ll be the spearhead to change that rule because we did discuss this in length last Monday night at the workshop. And everyone of you, I think, have received emails in the last two weeks.”

Commission Chair Johnny Bruce said he would allow the vote to happen.

All eight present commissioners, including Zach Marlow, approved the amendment to the interlocal agreement.

Zach Marlow requested someone from LUB explain the change in a meeting.

“I explained to you the other night that if you need to speak to someone from LUB, that you’ve got a cell phone, and you can call and talk to them,” Orick said to Marlow. “I will call a meeting. I asked that the other night. Nobody in this commission asked me to call the meeting.”

Orick said Marlow texted him requesting a Waterline Committee meeting recently.

“We can have a Waterline Committee meeting,” Orick said.

Orick requested to have a Waterline Committee meeting scheduled.

“If it’s me that held this up, I apologize, but I thought that I went around the room and gave everybody the notice of where we were at with Arthur Hill Circle,” Orick said. “And I also gave the point that if we don’t move forward with this and get these bids in, we will not have time to allocate the rest of the funding from the federal government by the end of December. And I am not one — and I’m sure the rest of the commissioners aren’t either — that they want to send this other money back to the federal government when we can use it on other projects.”