Rogers, Glenn yet to get together
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The meeting was to have followed a bid opening for roofing work at the highway department. Glenn’s son, assistant road superintendent Levie Glenn and highway department bookkeeper Angie Fuston were at the bid opening, but Fuston said later that they had been under the impression members of the Highway and Bridge Committee would be present, and when they weren’t, they didn’t think there would be a meeting, so they left.
Purchasing Committee members, including County Executive Kenneth Rogers, Director of Accounts Linda Hillis and Commissioner Herb Wright were present, and were ready to go over the situation with Glenn and try to resolve the issue. Rogers and Hillis said they were somewhat surprised when the highway department failed to bring up the letter for discussion.
Glenn had said in an interview published in the Southern Standard Sunday that he would address the issue in a meeting Tuesday.
“I invite Harold to come up here and talk to me any time about this,” Rogers said, but he did say no formal meeting had been set up.
“To my knowledge he hadn’t called a meeting, we just assumed this was going to be the meeting because we had a bid opening and the Purchasing Committee would be here already, and since this deal is with the Purchasing Committee I felt like this would have been the time to talk to him.”
Rogers still maintains the letter was the result of an effort to comply with the statutes set out in the road department’s private act and was not meant to limit the highway department’s spending, and just represented a change in the methods of reporting and approving expenditures.
Rogers also said the act was not an obscure law and in fact had been amended by the state several times over the years with the latest amendment being in 1998.
Rogers said the Purchasing Committee wanted to make the situation as easy to deal with as possible and realized it would require some extra effort on both sides, but in order to comply with all the statutes of the act, it needed to be done.
“He doesn’t have to come up here,” Rogers said. “He can call and say, hey, Kenneth I’ve blown a hose and it’s going to cost roughly $2,000, can you get that OK’d, and we can call a meeting that afternoon and call up and say, yes, go ahead and do it.”
The road superintendent was unavailable for comment, but sources at the highway department said the department is still working, doing mowing and other maintenance work, but would be unable to perform any work that required any more discretionary purchasing until the purchasing approval process was clarified.