Did you know the town of Huntersville received a Notice of Violation from the County’s Air Quality Department in August because the contractor used to demolish town-owned properties failed to submit any of the necessary asbestos surveys and NESHAP notifications? If you weren’t aware, don’t worry, neither was the town board. They only learned of this violation about a week ago and it wasn’t because the town manager informed them. And in case you haven’t already guessed, the contractor responsible for failing to submit any of the necessary asbestos surveys and NESHAP notifications that resulted in the violation was Teron Service, Inc.
So not only did Teron screw the taxpayers of Huntersville out of thousands of dollars for no-bid demo work with the approval of former town manager (now currrent town manager of Waxhaw) Greg Ferguson, they couldn’t even be bothered to submit the standard asbestos related paperwork. That’s just plain sorry.
By the way, I’m still waiting on Melinda Bales, Brian Hines, Joe Sailers, and Nick Walsh to publicly disavow the support they received from the owners of Teron, Ron and Teresa Julian, during the recent campaign.
The notice of violation is attached below. It speaks for itself. The attached emails also make clear that three people with the town (then interim town manager Gerry Vincent, town employee Michelle Haines, and town attorney Bob Blythe) knew about the potential violation as early as July 11 – over a month before the notice dated August 29 was sent to the town. If appropriate action had been taken by the town in a timely manner to address the concerns of Air Quality, it’s possible no violation would have been issued. Instead, all three town employees sat on this information for months and likely would have never disclosed it to the board. As of this morning, all three individuals are still employed by the town.
Why would Vincent fail to disclose this information to the board? Doesn’t seem like something an award-winning town employee would do (Vincent was voted the North Carolina Assistant Manager of the Year for 2013-14 by the North Carolina City and County Management Association). Is it possible he’s just so lazy that even notifying the town board of something so serious was too much work for him, or is it possible he was trying to keep the board and taxpayers in the dark about the no-bid Teron work prior to the election?
A special town board meeting was held yesterday at 10am in town hall for the purpose of discussing personnel. No action was taken after the board came out of closed session. The last time the board called a special meeting to discuss personnel was earlier this year in January and it resulted in the board accepting Mr. Ferguson’s resignation. Assuming the board called this special meeting for the same reason – to discuss the job of the town manager, it’s probably safe to also assume Vincent still has a job because the votes weren’t there to accept his resignation.
Mayor John “don’t you know how smart I am” Aneralla made his position clear prior to the board entering closed session when he publicly chastised the board members who called the special meeting. If Aneralla didn’t want Vincent gone, I’m also going to make an educated guess that his BFF Dan “I like to lie on campaign mailers” Boone wouldn’t go along with Vincent no longer being the town manager either. Another safe assumption is that if Aneralla and Boone wanted to maintain the status quo, Melinda “I throw around unfounded accusations of collusion without repercussion” Bales wasn’t in favor of changing the town’s leadership either. Because we all remember how adamant Commissioner Bales was about maintaining the status quo at HFFA despite the millions of reasons why a management change was needed. But, you know what they say about assuming so I welcome any comments from Aneralla, Bales, or Boone correcting the record.
Let the 2019 race for Huntersville’s next mayor begin.
Eric
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