Dear editor:

Hello, I am writing this letter explaining the reasons I chose to leave my job with the city. First and foremost I want to make sure everyone is aware that Steve and the electric crew have absolutely nothing to do with my decision to leave, they all have been extremely awesome to work for and with.

So with that being said I will start with my reasons. The first and biggest reason is due to the city doing a wage study. While yes I knew the wages when I started and was fine with it. Results of the study came out and as a journeyman lineman with 20-plus years experience, the wage to top out at is nowhere close to industry standards. I am well aware we are a small town and I don’t expect to be at the top end of industry standards but we should at least be in the middle range, which currently I am not nor would I be if I was topped out on my current line.

When we received the results we asked to meet with our City Administrator Zack Thorington about it. We showed up to the meeting with information to back what we had to say. I feel it was a total waste of our time to gather the info and meet with Zack, we were completely disregarded from the moment we entered the office. I felt he had an agenda for the meeting set in his head before we even got there and didn’t hear most of what we had to say. During this meeting we were told directly from Zack that lineman wages were severely over inflated, I feel this is extremely out of line now for him to say.

Zack has never been through a lineman apprentice training or done hot work, which we do fairly frequently. Yes I know it is part of our job and I am not arguing that, I am trying to give an example of why I feel he was out of line. I felt Zack showed absolutely no appreciation or regard for what we do and the risk and training involved in what we do as well as the years of experience we bring to the table. Zack has made the comment that he knows what goes on at the city — I find this comment contradictive due to the fact that in the little over three years I have been employed here the only time he has even visited our shop was when an individual purchased a new vehicle he stopped to see.

I don’t understand how you can say you know what goes on around the city when you don’t visit the departments around the city. In my time at the city I have also witnessed how there is no consistency for how people are treated by our administrator, everything is totally and completely different depending on who you are. I am not just trying to run him down, but I feel this is information that needs to be brought to attention and solved, as I feel with the way things are currently it runs the morale down within some departments.

On another note, another reason behind my decision to leave is when we had the meeting with Zack we had asked to have our standby pay changed to be more comparable with other local power companies. We took the time to call the other places to figure out what they received and presented this information to Zack. Our reason behind this is due to the fact that we are on call one week out of every four; this equates to a quarter of our life we are on call which we cannot go anywhere, or even have anyone in the truck with us that we are required to take home. This is an inconvenience for us especially those of us with kids.

We are all very aware we knew this when we hired on, but I feel like we should be able to get the on call stuff changed. What we asked for is a very minimal amount in the grand scheme of things. We all felt after the meeting that Zack was on board to make the change we asked for, which after approximately two weeks it was a hard, fast no. We received no reasoning behind the decision.

Ronnie Gillett 

Powell