First Ward Councilman Don Williams questioned a resolution he co-sponsored regarding contractor dumping at the city barns

“I contacted you about a resolution to end the contractor dumping over at the city barns. That seems to be the biggest problem that residents in the area are complaining about,” Williams stated at the recent city council meeting, addressing City Attorney Richard Morrisroe. “The first step I thought we could take was to try to stop the contractors from dumping there, but that’s not the resolution that you put forward that my name’s on. The resolution that I asked for was to stop the contractors from dumping.”

Mayor Wilfred Rosas commented that the request from Williams had left no language in there for elderly or disabled city residents that have contractors come in to take care of their yard.

‘They’re going to be charged more as you have no provisions in there for those folks, so I would not be supporting this. If this were to pass I would have to veto it,” Rosas added.

Williams appeared affronted that the verbiage of the proposed resolution was not what he asked for, and felt that the resolution should have passed or failed based on its own merits.

“That’s not what this resolution is stating here,” Williams said. “When I, as a councilman, ask the city attorney to do a resolution one way, to put it out there, if it fails at council then it fails at council, but not to change it without contacting me about it or to let me know why you’re changing it.”

Rosas defended, citing that there had been “no formal discussion on this whatsoever,” he felt that for Williams to want go straight to a resolution without involving him or anyone else in the administration was wrong.

“The issue is the law of unintended consequences,” Morrisroe chimed in. “That’s why I wrote that in here. The piles were created, the city started a service, a few administrations ago. Again to encourage the community to be reusing the grass, the brush to be able to create compost, mulch, etcetra. The unintended consequence is we put it in a neighborhood that’s surrounded by residences. The other unintended consequence, we opened it up at certain hours, but we don’t have a camera system in place and we don’t have anyone physically monitoring.”

Morrisroe went on to recommend that a conversation should take place within various departments to see what the best course of action is. He added that due to the high rent-to-owner ratio in terms of properties with lots of those landlords contracting out, plus senior citizens and disabled individuals, that to completely cut out all contracting service dumping was insufficient.

Fourth Ward Councilman Mike Civiletto looked several times to table the resolution for further discussion later, which was met with irritation by Williams as the requests were made while still speaking his discussion points. At the end of the meeting, the resolution was unanimously tabled.

“We decided to table it because it wasn’t quite what we were looking at for a resolution to begin with,” Williams told the OBSERVER following the meeting.

“We do need to take into consideration all the different things that can happen,” Civiletto added. “If it takes a couple extra weeks it’s not a big deal.