In Cave Springs, mayor vetoes bid to give 10 pink slips
CAVE SPRINGS — Mayor Travis Lee vetoed a City Council budget resolution to fire 10 Cave Springs city employees Thursday and accused council members of scheming to get rid of people they dislike, while council members accused Lee of incompetent spending.
The council held a special meeting Wednesday night and approved a resolution to eliminate the positions of 10 employees: Charlie Holyfield, the mayor’s chief of staff; Nicole Ferguson, city administrative assistant; B. J. Burney, the city’s building inspector; Craig Southern, city planner; Nathan Coy, a police officer who also does code enforcement; Gary Crews, a part- time police officer; Stephen Spann, a police clerk and code enforcement officer; Chris Burgess, a water and sewer employee; Jaci Hawkins, a deputy court clerk and water and sewer clerk; and Stephanie Wood, a building clerk.
The council can override the mayor’s veto with a twothirds vote when it meets again at 6: 30 p. m. Tuesday.
“The only thing I can think of [ as to why they did this] is public corruption,” Lee said Thursday. “There is nobody in their right mind who would do the things that they are doing to save the city.”
Alderman Mary Ann Winters said there was no vendetta from the Finance Committee, which put together the 2017 budget that was voted on during Wednesday’s meeting.
“We decided to go back to
the 2014 amount of employees we had,” Winters said. “We took the 2014 employee list and we went to those job descriptions at the time, and those are the job titles that we kept. It had nothing to do with allegiance.”
Lee said his best estimate was the city had 15 employees in 2014; Winters, when asked, did not know how many employees the city had in 2014.
The council also approved an ordinance that requires the mayor to receive council approval before he can make any expenditure; approve payments, sale or exchange municipal supplies; and make competitive proposals.
“I would say you can conclude that this is a [ no- faith vote] in the mayor,” Winters said.
Lee said those fired are people he hired since he took office two years ago, and that some city leaders and City Treasurer Kimberly Hutcheson did not like them. He said some of those fired are department heads, who the council cannot fire.
Hutcheson said Thursday that the council’s decision on who to fire was based on financial numbers she provided them.
“The City Council came to me to ask me about my budget and asked me who was paid what and they made their decisions based off of the payroll
documentation I gave City Council and our 2016 budget,” she said.
Lee said he believes there was clearly an agenda against the employees who were fired. Wood and Hawkins had defended him and denounced Hutcheson during a heated September city meeting. Holyfield and Coy also have spoken in support of Lee, and Southern consistently has supported Lee’s effort to build a trail in the city and connect it to the Razorback Greenway, which Winters and Alderman Larry Fletcher have criticized.
Fletcher, head of the Finance Committee, said there was no effort to conspire against any employee who has supported Lee.
“No, that did not come into play. What I’m looking at is the dollars and cents of the city,” Fletcher said.
Winters and Fletcher said Lee’s spending was out of hand. Winters added that she did not want to see the city fall into bankruptcy, which she speculated would endanger Cave Springs of being annexed by Springdale, Rogers or Bentonville.
Lee said all of his expenditures have been approved by the council.
As of Thursday, the general fund has $ 147,524, Hutcheson said. The general fund had a balance of $ 515,603 on Jan. 31, 2014, she said.
Lee previously has answered accusations of misspending by saying he wants an audit of the city’s finances because he knows it will vindicate him.