Hannibal City Council tables ordinances proposed by Louderman to give more oversight of Board of Public Works

HANNIBAL, Mo. — The Hannibal City Council voted to table a series of ordinances proposed by Mayor Barry Louderman that would change the city charter, giving more oversight of the Hannibal Board of Public Works (HBPW) to the city.

Louderman’s proposal called for:

• A 60-day notice of salary increases
• A 60-day notice of the budget
• A 60-day notice of rate increases
• Changing the number of votes by the City Council to remove a HPBW board member from five to four
• Requiring the Board of Public Works to meet with the City Council upon the request of the City Council

The proposal met resistance from Councilmen Robert Koehn, Mike Dobson and Scott Haycraft, and Charles Phillips made the motion to table the ordinances.

Louderman said after the meeting that if the City Council doesn’t pass the ordinances in its next two meetings, they won’t be added to the ballot for the April 8 municipal election and would likely have to be on the August ballot.

“I’ll talk to the three main ones about what they would like to see or what they would not like to see, and we’ll go from there,” Louderman said.

Louderman was the tie-breaking vote in September when the Hannibal Board of Public Works voted to increase the city’s electricity rates by nine percent instead of 15 percent, as it was originally proposed. He said Tuesday that vote was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

“I voted four times in a row to break a tie on that board, which I never should have to do,” he said. “That probably hasn’t happened four times in the last three mayors. If that’s the case, then why can’t there be a little bit more oversight by the city so that we don’t have that problem?” 

Louderman also said he’s going to push to add a fifth member to the Board of Public Works. Current members are Darrell McCoy, Bill Fisher, John Ortwerth and Kellie Cookson.

“Four is a ridiculous number,” he said. “You should never have an even number on any board. That leads to ties and all kinds of other issues.”

Koehn, who once served on the Board of Public Works on an interim basis, said after the meeting he has seen first-hand the intricacies involved in coming up with rates and how volatile electrical rates can be. 

“My major concern is if we get too much oversight — yes, we need to have some — it may almost kill the Board of Public Works,” he said.

Koehn was concerned that 60 days of notice was too long to inform the City Council of the HBPW budget.

“Part of that budget has built into it a rate increase or decrease, as it may apply,” he said. “The factors that go into it is that (the HBPW board) don’t know six months in advance, they don’t know three months in advance. By the time they get the information they need, trying to get the budget put together and crunched is a major thing.”

City Attorney James Lemon tried to explain to the City Council why he drafted the ordinances.

“The concern that the mayor and others have is that there is an attitude by the Board of Public Works that they don’t answer to this council, and therefore as a corollary, they don’t answer to the taxpayers,” he said. “It makes absolutely no difference to me what occurs here. What I’ve done is drafted what would be required in order for you to put this on the ballot, to let the voters make the decision if they want to do that.”

“I know there was an argument over the rate increase on the record,” Dobson said.

“There’s an argument on everything, Mike, and you’ve known that for years, the Board of Public Works operates with impunity outside of the city,” Louderman said. “As much as I expect people to run the Board of Public Works, the citizens of Hannibal need to have a say in how that’s done. Right now, you have a City Council that handles city business, and you have the Board of Public Works that handles the Board of Public Works business, and there’s no crossover.

“I feel that this is not a drastic step (by) the council. If the citizens decide to leave it as is, they decide to leave it as is.”

“My concern is that this is going from virtually no oversight at all to micromanaging what they are doing,” Koehn replied. “I can see board members say, ‘I ain’t gonna put up with that’ and resign, and no one else (will want) to go serve on the board because the City Council is basically taking over control.”

“If I have to have (providing electric, water and sewer service to Hannibal residents) taken out from underneath the charter and put back under the City Council as it was before, that’s micromanaging,” Louderman said.