An agreement renegotiated

The Kimball City Council presented Keep Kimball Beautiful with an amended contract on Tuesday, Feb. 2 following Mayor Keith Prunty’s continued attempts to reach an agreement.

Prunty began by stating that he had followed up with discussions from former KKB board members as well as interested citizens throughout the last month and read a timeline of the events as he recalled them.

“I would like to let council know what we have been doing and how this came about for this agreement,” Prunty said. “On Jan. 5, I got a request from Susie Abramson to discuss the roadblocks preventing the agreement from being executed between the City of Kimball and Keep Kimball Beautiful.”

On the afternoon of Jan. 27 Prunty met with KKB board members Eileen Rowley and Annette Brower, as well as, KKB employees Spud Rowley and KKB director Larissa Binod.

According to Prunty the three main points of contention were settled during the conversation. Those issues were the financial review, a dollar amount of financial support would be added to the contract for the year and the language regarding insurance would be amended to reflect more common practice.

Prunty then apprised City Council member James Shields and Board of Public Works chairman Jim Cederburg, as members of the agreement committee, of the recent events.

“With Daniel (Ortiz, City Administrator) and Kent’s (Hadenfeldt, City Attorney) work and after talking with the insurance agent, the agreement has been modified reflective of the points and still have the best interest of the citizens fulfilled,” Prunty reported. “I feel this has dragged out long enough, it needs to come to its conclusion. I would ask council to reconsider the agreement that they approved on the third (Nov. 3, 2015) and approve the agreement presented today with the proposed changes and the stipulation that the agreement be signed and executed by the next council meeting. If it is not then we should take action to evict them from the facility.”

In the amended contract, the amount KKB will receive from the City is spelled out, for the fiscal year.

The City still requests to know about any grants that KKB submits and receives, however, the language requiring the notification was moved from the paragraph outlining financial to that regarding reporting.

Additionally, language requiring the organization to provide a comprehensive line item expenditure report was struck as was the requirement to provide a recent budget to be submitted prior to financial disbursements from the City.

“Under section nine, which is the insurance component, the key issue was with regards to the language of holding the City harmless for any claims by KKB’s employees, agents, volunteers or representatives, they had challenges trying to find an insurer that can provide that type of coverage,” Ortiz said. “So after talking to our insurance provider, our agent and city attorney, that was removed provided that the City was still going to be named as an additional insured.”

Shields wish to clarify that negotiations done between the Mayor and the organization are final and that those involved had the authority to make those decisions.

“I want to clarify that these changes are ones that you talked with the board about,” Shields said. “When we started this process I was part of that original committee...I don’t think I missed a meeting. At the last meeting, when Larissa was not present, everyone in that room nodded their head, affirming, with the exception of maybe the conversation of the worker’s compensation, that we had hammered out the deal and it looked pretty good. Then it went south from there.”

“Now its come around to you are negotiating or talking to the board members, individually or as a group, and bringing it back to council, whereas I thought the committee had done this,” Shields said to Prunty. “We are doing a lot of conversationing with people who aren’t on the board, who has left the board, who may be on the board and now we are down to this. I got to tell you this is gotten to be pretty confusing.”

Council voted, with Shields casting the sole dissenting vote, to amend the original agreement to reflect the changes discussed and determined that the new contract should be made available for signatures from both entities at the next council meeting, Feb. 16.