In a special meeting Tuesday morning, Columbus City Council overrode Mayor Keith Gaskin’s veto of their decision to sever ties with Waggoner Engineering.
The council voted 5-1 to end its relationship with Waggoner during its regular Jan. 17 meeting. Gaskin vetoed the decision four days later.
Waggoner had been hired in December 2021 as the city’s consulting firm for spending American Rescue Plan Act funds.
At issue was a request for a third “task order” Waggoner made Jan. 17. The firm asked for $122,000 relating to alleviating drainage problems on Northside and in an area near Columbus Brick Company. The project would have included ditch cleaning and assessing inlets that were clogged or undersized.
The council voted to use $3 million of its ARPA allotment on drainage, and Waggoner’s plans envisioned a dollar-for-dollar match from the state Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, as well as $450,000 from the Lowndes County Board of Supervisors, producing nearly $7 million in total funding.
The task order was characterized by the council and by a Waggoner representative on Jan. 17 as a study. However, Tuesday morning Waggoner Vice President Zach Adams told the council the request was not to perform a study; it was to get the ball rolling on doing the work.
“We were not clear, and it is our fault, but (the task order) is not for a study,” he said. “It was design, bidding and contracting and construction oversight for a portion of the project.”
An approximately $1 million price quoted in the task order was for one initial piece of the project, Adams said, and was intended to give the city a “running start” on getting work done.
“We’re not going to initiate a task order for the full amount because we don’t know if you’re going to get the match,” he said. “Worst-case scenario, you don’t get the match, we’ve identified a portion of the Brickyard and a portion of Northside to move forward (with existing funds).”
The project “is much more complex than ditch cleaning,” he said, and would have remediated 26,000 linear feet of ditches and about 100 inlets and junction boxes that are “functionally obsolete.”
Adams apologized to the council for what he said was poor communication about the task order on Waggoner’s part.
“We have had an extreme failure to communicate,” Adams said. “When we have attempted to communicate, it’s been very poor communication. We own that ineffective communication, and we want to correct it going forward.”
After the meeting, Waggoner executives present declined to comment to The Dispatch.
‘We are not unaware of anything’
James Brigham, the city’s chief financial officer, told the council he thought Waggoner’s work thus far had been “very successful,” with the firm helping to bring in $3 million in federal money for blight eradication; a potential $3 million in MDEQ matching funds, if that application is successful; and a potential grant of about $2 million from the Natural Resources Conservation Service that would be used for planning and engineering costs.
Brigham cautioned the council that severing its relationship with Waggoner while the state matching funds are still up in the air was risky.
“If we are going to continue with this watershed program we are going to have to almost completely restart the whole process to identify a new engineering firm and bring them up to speed,” Brigham said. “If MDEQ rejected our application for matching funds because of actions we took, it’s too late for the new firm to reapply because the deadline is today.”
Vice Mayor Joseph Mickens said everything bears risk.
“It’s a risk every time I get in my car and drive up here,” he said. “It’s a risk every time I get on a plane. When I get up in the morning, it’s a risk. I don’t want to hear about risk.”
Mickens also disputed the notion the council didn’t understand what it was doing.
“There are two things I keep hearing,” Mickens said. “‘Unaware’ and ‘don’t understand.’ We perfectly understand what’s going on. We are not unaware of anything.”
Ward 1 Councilwoman Ethel Stewart expanded on that theme.
“It seems like we’re resistant to things because we don’t understand your plans and what your activity is,” she said. “It’s not that we’re so illiterate that we’re sitting here and we don’t understand what we’re dealing with.”
Broadly, Ward 4 Councilman Pierre Beard said he didn’t understand how information often made its way to the council, and he was especially frustrated with the process with Waggoner.
“We’re lost in limboland trying to figure out what’s going on, and then all of a sudden we come in here today with all this information,” he said. “…Tuesday at the council meeting it was studies. When we asked questions at the meeting, we didn’t get these answers.”
Ward 5 Councilman Stephen Jones complained that the council had no time to digest the information before being asked to vote.
“It was thrown to us two hours before our meeting, so you can understand why we were upset that night,” Jones said.
Adams apologized for that, too.
“That’s not the way we do business, and it’s not the way we’ll do business with the city going forward,” Adams said.
Ward 6 Councilwoman Jacqueline DiCicco was the lone voice speaking in Waggoner’s favor.
“What I heard the other night is we haven’t seen any shovels in the ground, we haven’t seen any action, this is another study,” DiCicco said. “This was not a study. This was a task order. This was actually to begin the work.”
Mickens moved to override the mayor’s veto, and was seconded by Stewart. The motion passed 5-1, with DiCicco voting no.
Four votes were necessary to override the veto.
Brian Jones is the local government reporter for Columbus and Lowndes County.
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