The McComb city board on Tuesday agreed to have City Administrator Quordiniah Lockley draft a letter ordering Civil Service commissioners to appear at its Aug. 10 board meeting to discuss their decision not to allow a former fire chief to return to the department.
The three commissioners had been scheduled to appear before the board Tuesday night to address McComb resident Albert Eubanks’ allegations that commissioners Larry Dorr and Izeal Bennett openly discussed “how not to allow (former Fire Chief Vernell Felder) to come back to the fire department” at the commission’s July 7 meeting.
Eubanks was the only witness to the conversation.
In a July 15 phone interview, Eubanks told the Enterprise-Journal that he wasn’t trying to imply that Dorr and Bennett were in cahoots to prevent Felder’s return.
“With the (city) board having appointed the commission, the board has the right to ask appointees to appear before the board for general discussion,” board attorney Wayne Dowdy said. “I don’t see a problem with you asking them to come for general discussion. I think you’re within your right to ask them to come for a general discussion of the business you’ve asked them to maintain.”
But at the commission’s special called meeting Tuesday afternoon, a couple of hours before the city board met, commissioners voted to decline the board’s invitation to appear at the city board meeting.
Reading a letter signed by Dorr, Bennett and commission chair Don Lazarus — and delivered to Lockley on Tuesday — commission attorney Ashley Atkinson referred to a 1980 state law that created the commission as an independent entity to separate it from politics.
“In 1980, special legislation was enacted to curb political interference with the police and fire departments,” Atkinson said. “The commission is of the opinion that such an appearance before the board of mayor and selectmen would jeopardize the independence of the commission, and will lead to political interference in the commission.”
Lazarus also took exception with Mayor Zach Patterson’s claim that the commission serves at the “pleasure of the board of mayor and selectmen.” Lazarus said commissioners are appointed and can be removed — for specific infractions — by the board.
Atkinson said that if the commission served the board, that would be “the exact opposite of state statute.”
After the vote, commissioners met in executive session to discuss unspecified “possible litigation” but took no action.
Selectman Melvin Joe Johnson disagreed with the commission’s reasons for declining to appear, citing the commission’s questioning former Fire Chief Jean Frye’s qualifications in May 2008.
“That can work both ways,” Johnson said. “I look at it at the time that they came before the board while (Frye) was with the fire department, and they were coming, having different issues on the status of that. So I don’t see why they want to decline on this issue here.”
When the commission approached the board in 2008, Patterson said the commission blatantly overstepped its bounds by taking on an investigation without a complaint from the board.
The mayor and Selectman Robert Earl Smith concurred that the commission made a mistake in approaching the board about the issue.
“They are a politically appointed body,” Patterson said Tuesday. “If you want to talk about political influence, the very vote of voting them in is political. So now they’re trying to declare political neutrality and political interference. All that talk is ridiculous on its face.”
It remains to be seen if the commission will appear at the next city board meeting, but the mayor said the commissioners will face a summons, not an invitation.
“We are asking them to appear before this board, as the appointing authority of that board,” Patterson said.
