Norris Water Commission recommends 6-year payout
The Norris Water Commission last week voted 4-1 to endorse a plan that would give water Superintendent Tony Wilkerson an additional $5,085 annually for the next six years in compensation for unused vacation and “comp” time he has billed the city for.
Water commissioners voted in favor of a contract that still must be approved by the Norris City Council to pay Wilkerson the extra money, which comes on the heels of a similar arrangement that netted the water superintendent $5,000 extra per year since 2018 for unused vacation time.
The newly proposed contract covers what it specifies as “575.1 hours of annual leave and 166.5 hours of compensatory hours.”
Wilkerson, however, did not immediately accept the Water Commission’s proposed contract, saying at the Tuesday night meeting that he wanted to have his attorney review it first.
To be able to have the payment contract approved by the City Council at its next regular meeting, March 13, the Water Commission plans a special meeting for 6 p.m. March 7 to give its final OK to the deal, pending Wilkerson’s agreement.
Voting for the payment plan were water commissioners Richard Dyer, chairman; Sue Hill, vice-chair; Margueritte Wilson; and Alex North. Opposing the plan was Norris City Councilwoman Loretta Painter, who is the council’s official representative on the Water Commission.
The extra payments to Wilkerson have been controversial, especially since the carryover of vacation and comp time have apparently exceeded terms of the city’s personnel policies.
Commission Chairman Dyer made a comment in a memo in 2018 suggesting that the commission should either “change the rules – or ignore them.”
Money the city owes Wilkerson led to a finding of “material error” by the external auditor, Travis Lowe, in the recent audit of the city’s 2021-22 fiscal year.
Despite Norris having an overall “clean” audit for 2022, the audit cited five “material errors” in the city’s financial report, two of which were directly related to the Norris Water Commission.
One of the Water Commission problems listed in the audit report presented to the City Council on Feb. 13 concerned a “Water Quality Control Act violation” that resulted in the city being fined by the state of Tennessee last year over the dumping of contaminated sewage into nearby Buffalo Creek from the city’s sewage-treatment plant.
Lowe, representing Pugh CPAs, noted that the sewage problem is being addressed by a multi-year action plan approved by the state, but will remain an issue on the city’s audit reports for the next few years until the problems are fixed.
Norris expects to spend up to $7 million to remedy the sewage issues, which were outlined by the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation in a “director’s order” to the mayor last February, which found the city in violation of water-quality regulations concerning discharges from the sewage-treatment plant on East Norris Road near Andersonville Highway.
The second “material error” associated with the Water Commission, Lowe said, was a long-term violation of the city’s own “leave policy,” in which the commissioners allowed Wilkerson to bank the vacation and comp time that he now expects the city to pay him for.
“Leave policy needs to be followed,” Lowe told the City Council.
He noted that “management allowed a practice to develop” contrary to city personnel policy.
Under that “practice,” the city now faces a payout to Wilkerson of more than $30,000 from water and sewer funds to cover his banked vacation and comp time.
Water commissioners are in the process of renegotiating Wilkerson’s base pay to give him a raise so he would not be entitled to compensatory time off for working more than 40 hours a week.
The city also is working on an updated personnel policy, which will be the subject of a public hearing at 6:30 p.m. on March 13.
That policy reportedly will close loopholes or clear up ambiguous language in the current policy that may have led the Water Commission to allow Wilkerson to bank his vacation and comp time.
Painter, who in December was appointed to the Water Commission as the City Council’s representative, has been calling for a resolution to Wilkerson’s leave issue since last June, when it came up in meetings on the city’s 2022-23 fiscal year budget.
Commission Chairman Dyer commented in a July 26, 2019, memo titled “Backup systems for Norris Water Processing Plant: Options and opinions,” that violations of personnel policy in favor of water and sewer system employees might be justified.
“If our rules prevent doing what is needed, we must change the rules – or ignore them,” Dyer wrote.
Mayor Chris Mitchell has said he is in favor of paying Wilkerson for the banked leave and comp time “because it had been officially recorded as a liability on the city’s accounting books” by the auditors.
The mayor said he wants to move forward with a revised personnel policy that would prevent such an issue from developing again.
