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COLUMBUS, Ga. — The Fountain City’s Bravest will no longer be the only city employees forced to mow the city’s grass while on duty, with councilors approving a $100k annual budget to outsource the yard work instead.

Budget allocations made by City Manager Isaiah Hugley previously left our city’s firefighters to mow the lawns of the city’s firehouses while on duty, often having to respond to calls for medical emergencies while stewing in their own filth and grass-covered bodies. Fire & EMS personnel were even forced to provide their own lawn care equipment from their own pockets.

When city councilors learned of this, they immediately took action to rectify the situation at the July 25 council meeting.

During the meeting, Hugley sought approval on his plan for grounds maintenance. Councilor Judy Thomas (District 9), noticed that Hugley’s plan explicitly labeled the fire department as ‘dependent upon funds,’ though Hugley somehow managed to find the money to mow the grass at every other city structure.

Hugley intentionally left Fire & EMS off the list, leaving them to mow their own grass, out of their own personal pockets, while being on duty to service the city’s emergencies.Imagine doing that to employees at City Hall, the Finance Department, or the Mayor’s Office. Obviously, that wouldn’t fly. 

Nonetheless, Hugley planned on doing that to Fire & EMS, just as he has already done for the entire 18 years that he’s been the city manager.

Thomas pointed this out, stating the following:

“(Your plan) says ‘contingent upon funding availability.’ I was not aware until I saw this and started asking some questions that the practice for ground maintenance of fire stations is carried out by the firefighters at that station; that at all of the 14 stations in Columbus, Fridays of every week is designated as ‘yard work day.’ It is on those days that the firefighters at that station cut the grass, trim the bushes, do all of the yard maintenance — and they do it while they are on duty. Part of my concern is that's not their job to keep the grass cut at the fire station. Their job is to be available to answer fire calls and EMT ambulance calls and so forth for our citizens. One of my major concerns is — and I talked with a number of firefighters over the last day or so about this — suppose you're a firefighter at station number two, and you're out cutting the grass, and you get a call that's a Fire EMS call. You don't stop and go take a shower and get rid of all of the dirt and the grass clippings and so forth. You go straight to the truck, put on your turnout gear, and go to whatever the emergency is. I could deal with that if we were just talking about the fire truck going, but we're talking about EMT work; we're talking about ambulance work — and if you come to an ambulance call straight from mowing the grass at station number two, the chances are you're going to be dirty and you're going to have grass clippings on your uniform … The firefighters that I talked with told me a number of other things that I didn't know. One of them was if they have a gas-powered lawn mower, you know who buys the gas? The firemen. The firefighter, not the city … If that lawn mower breaks down, you know who fixes it? The firefighter. They have to pay for that kind of stuff. Many of them, because they do this on a regular basis, have brought equipment from their house to the station so that they can do their job … This is something that is to me quite unacceptable, particularly when you say that it's contingent upon funding availability. In a $334 million budget that has over a hundred days in the fund balance, it would seem to me that we have enough funding so that these firefighters don't have to cut the grass at the fire station. It’s just mind-boggling that they have to do that … We’ve got to fix this and we’ve got to fix it right away.”

In response to Thomas’ logical, diligent, and well-articulated comments, Hugley — as usual — provided his standard operating procedure of ‘duck, dodge, and deflect.’ Hugley responded with the following after apparently having been asleep for the past ten minutes of the meeting:

“I don’t know that we have ever required firefighters to mow grass,” Hugley unbelievably said.

As usual, instead of owning the situation and offering to propose any sort of a managerial solution, Hugley chose to deflect blame by suggesting that not only was the problem not his fault, but that it somehow didn’t even exist.

Councilor Thomas was having none of it. She immediately called Hugley out on his deflection, bringing the conversation back to reality:

“Well no one else is mowing it, and they’re being told they have to,” Thomas exclaimed to Hugley.

Either Hugley was too dense to make the connection himself, or he was following his usual modus operandi of deflecting blame. Given the obviousness of the latter, it appeared to be a combination of both.

Hugley then responded by saying ‘but that’s the way we’ve always done it,’ stating the fire department has never asked for the scenario to change. That was a lie.

Chief Salvatore Scarpa then came to the podium and pointed out how odd it was that Columbus Fire & EMS was cutting the grass. Scarpa directly stated that he had in fact tried to change it, which immediately proved Hugley to being lying and further exposed him as the escape artist he was hoping to be:

“When I first came to Columbus,” Scarpa said, “I thought it was odd that we mowed grass, so I made some inquiries. The response I got from our firefighters was ‘that's what we've always done.’ I said ‘well that's kind of unusual, let's see if we can we can maybe change that.’”

Councilors then moved, voted on, and approved a $100k annual budget from reserve funding for the grounds maintenance of the city’s fire stations and associated auxiliary buildings. 

Ten minutes. That’s all it took. Perhaps councilors should consider why it took Hugley 18 freaking years to do absolutely nothing about it. We are sensing a strong theme. How aMaZinG.

Facts are stubborn things — and we’ll keep publishing them, whether city officials like them or not.

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