Clement defends actions of office

Clement provided his extemporaneous explanation of the encounter to another Journal reporter following Tuesday’s budget committee meeting.

He noted that he was particularly stung by the newspaper’s May 26 editorial calling his department a “do-nothing department.”

That was a reference to Commissioner Steve Worley’s recent criticism about the lax enforcement of county code requirements by Clement’s other department, License & Permits.

Said Clement: “You can say a lot of things about me, but you can’t say I’m lazy.”

Since taking on both departments two years ago, Clement said he has routinely worked 60 hours a week, much of it to repair and replace heating and air conditioning systems in the county’s 54 buildings.

He noted that he has not been compensated for taking on that second department that now consumes most of his time.

But he said commission chairman Danny Yearwood now has directed him to stop working overtime.

So in his FY2011 budget request, Clement is asking for $37,000 to hire a full-time HVAC technician to take over some of the work.

That position was eliminated in the county’s 2009 reduction in force, according to Clement.

There was no such position eliminated in the reduction in force, according to Michelle Thrasher, benefits coordinator in the Human Resources Department.

In addition to the new position, Clement’s Buildings & Grounds budget requests $120,000 for building repairs & maintenance — much of it to contract for even more HVAC services.

But when Yearwood at Tuesday’s committee meeting questioned the amount of that additional funding, Clement agreed it could be reduced.

‘NO COMMENT’
Since the Journal’s coverage of his staff’s unpleasant encounter with a reporter May 21, Clement’s department has responded quickly to all of the newspaper’s open-records requests for documents.

In fact, there may be another factor that led to Clement’s initial “no comment” and his staff’s open aggression toward the newspaper.

There is some evidence of a top-down move by Yearwood’s administration to curtail this newspaper’s easy access to public information.

During Tuesday’s budget meeting, Yearwood said “no comment” in response to every question asked by the Journal.

Then when the reporter approached an empty area of the conference table to try to snap a close-up photograph of the new fire chief, Donald Towne, sitting next to interim fire chief John Skinner, Yearwood protested: “You haven’t filed an open-records request to take that photo.”

He continued protesting as the reporter continued to snap additional photographs, but also smiled and chuckled as he said it.

Then, when the reporter asked the Cairo fire chief a question, Yearwood told him, “Say ‘no comment.’”

A year from now, Yearwood told him, he would find himself saying “no comment” to every question. Finance department staff at the table disagreed, advising the new chief that attempting to keep information away from the Journal would be a waste of time, because its reporter would get the information another way.

While the banter turned friendly, other county sources in recent weeks have indicated that the administration plans to require the newspaper to file more open-records requests in order to force it to pay for the information it receives from the county.

Under the Georgia Open Records Act, a government may charge not only for copies of documents but also for all time in excess of the first 15 minutes that is spent responding to the request.

However, it is worth noting that after everyone other than operations development manager Bob Hohe had left the budget committee meeting Tuesday, Yearwood conversed freely with the reporter who had covered the meeting.