Garland hires attorney, opts for waiver over Workers’ Comp

The Garland Board of Commissioners made less than 10 decisions at Tuesday night’s meeting, but the decisions they made will be ones to last for a long time.

One of the major decisions made at the meeting was to hire Clinton attorney Greg Griffin to represent Garland in a legal capacity. The decision was made after a 10-minute discussion, which mostly focused on the contract between the town and Griffin, specifically what Griffin could charge the town for, and whether that would include people in the town calling Griffin directly.

“He’s to work for us as the board, not Joe Bloke calling to run up a bill that we have to pay,” Commissioner Lee Carberry said. “That needs to be in verbiage.”

But after 10 minutes of discussion, Commissioner Ralph Smith Jr. made a motion to hire Griffin, effective immediately. That motion also included ironing out the details of the contract at a later date.

“Let’s just go ahead and do what we got in here,” Commissioner Smith said while gesturing to the contract Griffin had given the town. “And sit down and talk to him and say, ‘look we don’t want all this.’”

The motion was approved by all the board members present.

The next order of business after that was an item dealing with worker’s compensation for the “working” commissioners on the board, members who actually provide physical labor.

According to Mayor Austin Brown, this was brought up because commissioners Carberry and Timothy Blackburn often go out and work throughout the town assisting the public works employees. But when Commissioner Anthony Norris looked into it, they found doing so was a liability issue for the town.

“So, in order to cover them, they had to either sign a waiver that said they’re releasing the town of any liability, or we had to cover them with worker’s comp,” Brown said.

The mayor went on to say that the worker’s comp was around $251 per person, and it wouldn’t end up just being Carberry and Blackburn who would be covered.

“If you’re gonna do it for those two, you’ve got to do it for everybody,” Brown stressed to the board. “With it being a small town, some of us have to work to help out.”

“So we just sign a waiver for it,” Blackburn told the rest of the commissioners when discussing what should be done at the meeting.

With that in mind, the board members voted to have all those working for the town to sign a waiver declaring the town could not be held liable for any injuries.

Other notable decisions made by the board was dissolving their contract with Cintas for employee uniforms and instead have employees buy their own while the department will provide funding for safety vests and coveralls; taking down the high school senior banners that line main street the week of June 17 and hanging up the flags, instead; and approving the funds to replace the roof on Well House No. 3 due to it leaking.