Utility let manager, friend live rent-free

A high-ranking manager at the Little Rock Wastewater Utility is living rent-free at the Fourche Creek Treatment Facility, according to documents obtained by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

The utility paid nearly $11,592.90 in labor and parts to move a mobile home belonging to Operations Manager Stan Miller onto treatment plant property at 9500 Birdwood Drive in southeast Little Rock, according to work orders and receipts obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request.

The project included installing utilities, paving a gravel path to the site and work orders for cleaning and winterizing the mobile home.

John Jarratt, the utility’s director of administration and community relations, told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that Miller was living at the facility as of Thursday and that Miller’s girlfriend, who is not a utility employee, often stays with him in the mobile home.

Jarratt said he did not know if Miller had asked permission for his girlfriend to stay at the facility, which is not open to the public and has secure-entry devices requiring access codes.

A Dec. 4 email from Jarratt to Sanitary Sewer Committee members said that utility Chief Executive Officer Reggie “Corbitt instructed Mr. Stan Miller to temporarily locate his mobile home and himself [to] the Fourche facility so there will be a qualified operator on site when and if issues occurred during this transition period.”

The transition period referred to the loss, in quick succession, of two treatment facility superintendents, Jarratt wrote.

The email notes that Miller removed his mobile home from the plant property Nov. 14 because the transition had been completed.

Jarratt then wrote that Miller brought a different mobile home to the site Dec. 1, so he could be “available to train and supervise newly hired operators.”

Jarratt also confirmed that the home is located close to the treatment plant’s chlorination tank. The tanks have several safeguards to prevent the release of chlorine gas in the event of a leak, but even those are not foolproof.

Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality officials were not available to answer whether allowing someone to live next to the tanks was a safety or environmental hazard because the agency’s office was closed because of Friday’s inclement weather.

Ken Griffey, chairman of the Sanitary Sewer Committee, said he was unaware of Miller’s living situation before he saw a Freedom of Information Act request from the Democrat-Gazette.

“This is not something that the Sanitary Sewer Committee sanctioned or had any knowledge of,” Griffey said. “The committee takes this issue very seriously and will immediately look into it. This is not the way a public utility should operate. This committee has pledged to be transparent and good stewards of the ratepayers’ dollars.”

The committee members are appointed by the Little Rock Board of Directors to oversee certain aspects of operations and finance for the utility, which is a semi-autonomous agency. The Board of Directors must approve rate increases or fees charged to ratepayers, but does not oversee any other aspect of the utility’s finances or operations.

According to the work orders and receipts for purchases made between Oct. 24 and Nov. 14, the utility spent $5,797.42 on supplies, including electrical supplies, a trencher, pipe fittings, screws, locks and about $1,600 worth of gravel.

The work orders showed 177 hours of labor went into clearing a site for the home, laying pipe and installing utilities. But several line items for the project summary also included notes about cleaning and winterizing.

The work orders that corresponded with the numbers on the project summary did not contain details about whether the trailer was cleaned and weatherized, but no other building was involved in the project. Jarratt said he did not know about the specific work performed.

Jarrett’s email notifying sewer committee members of the Democrat-Gazette’s Freedom of Information Act request offered different explanations of why Miller is living at the site.

“As a result of the superintendent of our Fourche Treatment Facility taking an immediate transfer to our Engineering Services Department along with the superintendent of our Little Maumelle Treatment Facility taking a position in the Engineering Services Department within a week of the transfer, it left Mr. Stan Miller with no experienced or qualified supervision of a fairly young Operations Department staff,” the email said.

Jarratt said the utility did not plan to send Miller to the Little Maumelle Treatment Facility even though its supervisor also left.

Jarratt said the staffs at the two facilities were comparable in terms of training and years of work experience with the utility.

Another site, the Adams Field Treatment Facility, has been without a permanent supervisor for several years.

When asked if Miller had plans to live at that facility or had ever lived there, Jarratt said that Miller had lived intermittently in his mobile home at the Adams Field operation for several months.

Jarratt said the dates when Miller lived there and cost for setting up a mobile home at the Adams Field facility were not available late Thursday. The wintry weather kept nonessential staff from reporting to work Friday, so that information was not available for this article.

Jarratt said several staffing changes, including the length of shifts at the Fourche plant, were made shortly before Miller moved to the treatment facility. Shifts were cut from 12 hours to eight hours, which has saved the utility some money in overlapping workers, he said.

When asked if the changes were prompted by a particular incident, Jarratt confirmed that an unknown employee or employees at the plant had shot signs throughout the facility with guns.

“We did a walk-through and saw that every sign had been shot,” he said. “There were shell casings everywhere, including one we found in a car [employees] use to drive around the facility.”

The utility administrators decided to handle the incident with an internal investigation rather than filing a police report.

The incident was reported to utility administrators about a month before Miller moved onto the treatment plant property.

Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola said he had several issues with Miller’s move.

“If this was a security measure and the two things are supposedly related, I’m not sure that having [a manager] act as the security guard is our best use of resources,” he said. “If there are spent shell casings on site, especially in an employee vehicle, this seems like something where the police should have been involved. This is an incident that involves a weapon, even when used as a method of vandalism.”

Stodola said he also wanted an explanation of why the utility would allow Miller to take the mobile home that had been improved using public money and public employee labor offsite and replace it with a different mobile home.

“This sounds crazy, and I think we need an explanation … of all of it,” he said. “I have serious concerns about the lack of leadership at the utility.”

Ward 4 City Director Brad Cazort has raised the idea several times of taking control of the agency and operating it as a city department. After finding out about Miller living at the sewer facility, he said he was ready to talk about the possibility again.

“This evidences continuing and long-ongoing extravagant expenditures on behalf of the wastewater utility, and it calls into my mind extraordinary questions of whether the rate increases we’ve given them are paying for what they were intended to fund,” he said.

“I mean, it sounds like they used public money to fix up a privately owned vehicle and paid for personal benefits for this man up to and including providing a place for his girlfriend to live. I think it’s time to reopen the conversation about whether the utility should be running as an independent entity.”

Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/09/2013

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