GREENFIELD — Whether Greenfield restores money to its budget to replenish the ranks of its building and health inspectors will return at a Dec. 19 City Council meeting.
Following the council’s rejection Tuesday of a Board of Health request for $43,000 to replace inspectors who have left following budget cuts last July, Councilor Sheila Gilmour filed for reconsideration of the issue.
After a confusing discussion Tuesday night, Gilmour had voted with the majority of the council against spending about $43,000 on the two inspection departments so that they can make it through June, to the end of the fiscal year.
“I just wasn’t comfortable because I couldn’t rely on the information,” said Gilmour, who had originally tried to table the matter, but received not a single vote of support.
With her parliamentary move Wednesday, the request for additional health and building inspector funding is on hold but will come up again at the regular December council meeting.
Meanwhile, Councilor Brickett Allis has come under fire for his actions at the City Council meeting, where he led opposition to the funding request. He had also led the move to cut the inspections department during budget writing last summer.
There were two sets of facts raised Tuesday that complicated what Gilmour thought she knew, both of which were introduced by Allis, and ally Isaac Mass.
First, Mass challenged whether the Health Department didn’t have enough money to pay for the additional full-time position the Board of Health claimed it desperately needed.
Allis cited a “nine-page” long email with Lane Kelly, the former finance director who retired and came back on a volunteer full-time basis. The emails, he said, showed significantly more money had already been spent on the employees who weren’t supposed to be working at the health department. The numbers may have referenced a report that wasn’t properly updated between multiple changeovers in finance department and therefore may be erroneous.
“I still need to wrap my head around and review these numbers and make sure I understand what we’re talking about,” Gilmour said Wednesday.
Secondly, in an 11th hour move, Allis made a veiled reference about using roughly $15,000 of unused money from the Greenfield Police Department’s capital budget. Allis, briefly holding up a piece of paper, cited an internal communication between Police Chief Robert Haigh and an employee that three police cruisers were not, in fact, being purchased.
This thought was used by Allis to present an alternative way to pay for the additional health inspector for the next six months.
Yet, in a statement written by Haigh, sent to the Mayor’s Office and City Council by midday Wednesday, the chief set the record straight.
“I find that after last night’s meeting I should clarify the statements and innuendos made by Councilor Allis in regard to an email he obtained from someone from within one of the departments I supervise,” Haigh’s email began.
Haigh outlined the recent budget history on how the council had decided to fund the cruisers. He said he had originally asked for three marked cruisers for his patrolmen, which was removed from his budget based on Allis’ belief, Haigh said, that the chief was using the money to buy new vehicles for his command staff.
Ultimately $15,000 was leftover in the chief’s budget, but he already planned to use it to pay to replace the unmarked cruiser that was wrecked from a fatal accident in October 2017. The insurance was only going to cover about $29,000.
“It’s not free money that I can throw around for whatever I want,” Haigh said when reached later in the afternoon. “It’s money for a cruiser that we desperately needed.”
Regardless of whether the chief had extra money in his budget, it remained unclear how Allis could suggest using money budgeted for capital purchases toward salaries in the health department. It’s “another example of how he addresses me and the departments I represent,” Haigh said about Allis.
Haigh, though, was not asked to attend the meeting Tuesday night at GCTV.
“In the future, I would appreciate the opportunity to provide information that any councilor would be seeking to address at a council meeting, regardless if you wish for me to be there,” he said in his letter.
You can reach Joshua Solomon at:
jsolomon@recorder.com
413-772-0261, ext. 264