With Halloween creeping closer, Augusta City Administrator Fred Russell gave commissioners a scary 2012 budget proposal with a $7.39 million shortfall and looming specters of a property-tax increase or skeletal city services.

Advertisement

And commissioners didn’t say boo. Unlike previous years, they didn’t wait to hear Russell’s warnings and recommendations but adjourned Tuesday’s meeting and left. It was just as well because it was similar to the 2011 proposal with its
$8.3 million shortfall.

Next year is different though, Russell said.

“They need to make a decision as to whether they want to raise taxes or cut services,” he said. “We’re not going to be able to pull the rabbit out of the hat next year. The rabbit is dead.”

This year, the gap was bridged by robbing Peter to pay Paul. They took $1.5 million from reserve funds and $2.3 million from capital outlay funds, saved $1 million from five furlough days and $1.5 million through city government reorganization. Another $2 million was supposed to come from property sales, but that got delayed in a controversy over which real estate company would do the selling.

Department heads have requested almost $1 million in new employees and $1.16 mil­lion in new programs.

THAT MUCH IS GOING TO BE HARD TO SWALLOW: Expect outrage and red faces Monday, when Utilities Director Tom Wiedmeier, in response to demands from Commissioner Alvin Mason, tells the engineering services committee how many gallons of city water Forest Hills Golf Club has used and how much money the city would have collected if the club had paid the going rate instead of $143 a month for “finished” water, the most expensive kind, for longer than anybody can remember – or will admit.

HOW MANY UTILITY WORKERS DOES IT TAKE TO SCREW UP A JOB? When city utilities department employee Shaheem Unique Monroe, was arrested Tuesday in connection with the theft of 11 industrial brass water meters and a large spool of copper tubing, Wiedmeier said there were questions about how Monroe gained access to the meters, which should have been locked up.

Those questions were answered the next day, when Monroe’s supervisor, Patrick Maurice Cooper, was booked into the Richmond County Detention Center in connection with the theft of the same meters and copper belonging to the department.

That brings the total of utility department employees arrested and charged with job-related crimes in recent months to five, one of them accused of selling crack cocaine from his utilities truck. Two others were fired last year after being videotaped conducting time-card fraud.

There must be something in the water.

A WHOLE LOT OF SMOKE: Results of investigations into the Augusta Fire Department were anti-climactic seeing as how they confirmed much of what the media had already reported, the most serious being safety violations by firefighters during a January house fire that left a firefighter severely injured. Deputy Administrator Bill Shanahan’s investigation also confirmed that Battalion Chief Tommy Willis violated policies by managing his side business 1-800-BoardUp on department time.

However, no misuse of department vehicles turned up, and the only chief who’d had pornography on his city computer looks like somebody’s great-great-grandpa. Assistant Chief Jack Hanley has been put on paid leave for being naughty while city officials decide how to punish him. It turned out that Deputy Chief Carl Scott had used a vehicle to attend a meeting in Columbia and on his way back to Augusta had stopped by his aunt’s house for nine minutes to use the bathroom.

I wonder who was timing him.

DO YOU MIND IF I SMOKE? I DON’T CARE IF YOU BURN: The commission’s public services committee is expected to vote Monday on an ordinance that would ban smoking and the use of
e-cigarettes in public places. The city held two public hearings this month, during which 37 people spoke.

At the second public hearing, smokers repeatedly (and sometimes angrily) asserted that anyone banning them from smoking in a bar was attacking their fundamental rights. Sometimes, though, there were a few leaps in logic. Smoker Amy Lewis used the analogy of the famous boy in the plastic bubble case as an example of how the “do-gooders” are trying to restrict her freedom by making bars nonsmoking.

“Because what you are trying to do is you are trying to put everybody in your plastic bubble,” she said. “And not everyone wants to live in your plastic bubble. Some of us want to be free. You choose to live in your plastic bubble, that’s fine. So far, this is still America and not another communist country. You go crawl into your plastic bubble. And while you are there, zip it up.”

Noah Garcia, who thinks e-cigarettes should not be part of the ban, doesn’t think it would work even if the ban is passed.

“I’m going to do it anyway, regardless,” he said. With all the restrictions, the country is “about to become like Nazi Germany,” he said.

Angela Moore said she is tired of the “do-gooders” telling her not to smoke when they might drink and drive.

“Don’t take away my choices and my freedom,” she said. “I’ve had enough of government getting in my life and telling me everything that I can and cannot do. Enough is enough.”

NOTHING LIKE A GOOD SMOKE AFTER A MESS OF FRIED FISH: Lewis Harbeson, plumber, electrician and jack of all trades, came to put in a new dryer vent and while here said he’d run into an old acquaintance at a fish fry the day before. His name is Hoyt, and he’s 90 years old and he’s smoked since he was a kid.

“Hoyt said the doctor told him if he didn’t stop smoking there was a possibility he might not live to be 100,” Lewis said.

HEY, THAT’S OUR CUTE ACRONYM: Georgia Health Sciences University announced last week that it will be offering first- and second-year medical students a program in how to mentor students in underserved areas as a way of potentially addressing health disparities. It will be called HEAL for Health Equity and Access Leaders. Across the street from the university, Paine College announced last week that it had begun construction on its own HEAL – the Health Education Activities Learning (HEAL) Complex.

All of this to us is an ACHE or Acronym-Causing-Headache Encounter.

City Ink thanks Staff Writer Tom Corwin for his contribution to this week’s column.