Earle set to junk old cars

Earle set to junk old cars

City to dispose of clunkers ahead of community- wide cleanup effort

news@theeveningtimes.com

Earle has decided against re-advertizing and trying to sell several junk cars, and will instead haul them off to the junk yard.

The city placed an ad for bids for three junk cars, but only received one bid for an Impala.

The council voted to accept the $300 bid for the Impala and to and haul off the rest for scrap.

“Apparently nobody is interested in the rest,” said Mayor Sherman Smith.

The city still has an old Ford F-150 pickup and a Crown Victoria parked behind city hall which are both inoperable.

Smith said that since the city isn’t going to ever fix them, it is time to get rid of them.

“We have all these things that we haven’t fixed and won’t ever fix,” Smith said. “Enough time has gone by.

It’s a junk yard. We aren’t going to do anything with those cars. I’m tired of looking at them. We’re not going to have a junk yard here.”

Councilman Robert Malone agreed.

“I vote we get rid of them,” Malone said.

In other business:

• The council approved the nomination of Tony Wells to serve on the Water Commission.

• Mayor Smith announced that they will be holding a month long community clean-up and beautification effort during November.

“We invite everybody to come out and bring their axe, bring their hoe, slingblade or whatever,” Smith said. “Let’s do a thorough job of cleaning up. We want to see a significant impact. I don’t want to see one house cleaned up, then one lot grown up, then another house cleaned up. We want to see whole streets cleaned up.”

• City Clerk Cynthia Conner told the city council that she will use one of the city’s part-time dispatchers to fill in as assistant city clerk for ten hours a week.

Conner has been without an assistant since July, but told the council that she will wait until budget time to decide when to fill the position.

“I do need somebody,” Conner said. “But with it coming to the end of the year I’m going to wait to see the budget.”

• Smith said he will be meeting with the state this week to discuss another round of street aid money to fix the city’s streets.

• Heard from Earle High School 9th grade civics teacher Sandress McVay about a $400 grant the school received from Rural Community Alliance and the Rural Schools Collaborative. The money will be used to increase community awareness and to create a student pamphlet showing the zones of each elected representative.

“We’re trying to increase participation,” McVay said.

“We need more young people to know about our government.”

McVay said she has two classes of ninth graders taking civics class. The students recently visited the county courthouse where they got a lesson on county government from County Judge Woody Wheeless.

“Our children were really involved and had some really good questions,”

Earle Mayor Sherman Smith McVay said.

“When I was in school civics was my favorite class,” Mayor Smith added.

• City Attorney Davis Loftin informed the council that the city will be turning over $4,000 that was seized in a traffic stop to the Circuit Court Clerk’s custody.

“The driver took off and left $4,000 in the car,” Loftin said. “The owner of the car claimed the money.

Another lady came in and claimed the money. He (driver) came in and claimed the money. And his wife came in and claimed the money. So all we are doing is paying the money into the circuit court and leaving it up to the judge to determine who gets the money so the city has no liability.”

• The council passed an ordinance designating the chief of police as the primary collector of bonds and fines for the city.

The city currently has two accounts for the money but was told by state auditors that they could designate one official to collect the money and deposit it into one account.

“That way, we will only have to account for it one time and it takes away a lot of the paperwork that the court clerk and dispatcher are having to do,” Loftin said.

• Smith asked Loftin to develop a policy on personal property settlement matters. “Last month we talked about the auditors telling us to be conscious of personal property settlements,” Smith said. “If we have an incident where we are thought to be liable they are saying it would be good to have some policies in place to give us some guidelines on whether we pay a claim.”

Smith said auditors noted that the city paid $976 in damages after its tractor hit a parked car in an alley, but informed them that the city has some immunity from paying out damages, and that its insurance may or may not have paid that claim.

The city recently had a resident claim they hit a pothole which caused damage to her vehicle and wanted the city to pay. And just this past week, Smith witnessed a city mower shoot a rock out which broke a resident’s window by accident.

“These are the kinds of incidents I’m talking about,” Smith said. “The city does have a (insurance) policy for some of those types of things. But with these guidelines in place it will stop us from paying things we shouldn’t. It will protect us from those things.”

• Announced that the next community development meeting will be held Nov. 7 at 6:30 p.m. at the Community

Center.

By Mark Randall