By Cassady Rosenblum
The Parsons City Council had its first meeting since Mayor Dorothy Judy was hospitalized with COVID-19 earlier this August. While the mayor was back in good spirits, several other committee members were absent. After reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and offering a prayer for the community amidst another wave of COVID-19, the council approved a list of invoices totaling $81,757.72 dollars for August, and motioned to purchase a salt and sand spreader for no more than $7,000 dollars ahead of winter. They also approved a backlog of monthly financial reports dating from March, April, May, and June, and acknowledged receiving a summary of assets pertaining to the Harman Fund.
As of July 31, the Harman Fund was worth more than $21,000,000 dollars. Parsons, which gets 5% of the dividends every year, received a little over $1 million dollars this year to spend on the parks, cemetery, library, and other projects that “benefit the citizens of Parsons.”
As many citizens are aware, the late William Mahan Harman is responsible for the fund. Harman was a “silver-tongued” criminal lawyer and president of the First National Bank of Parsons who opted to stay in Parsons despite being educated at the University of Southern California because, as his friend Jane Barb remembered it to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in a 2004 article titled “A Down-On-Its-Luck West Virginia Town Hits The Jackpot,” he preferred to be a “big fish in a little pond than a little fish in a big pond.”
Harman and his wife Louise never had children, and when Harman died, he left between $200,000 and 300,000 dollars to the city of Parsons. By the time Louise died in 2002, the fund had swelled to around $13 million. Since then, it has nearly doubled in size thanks to historic gains in the stock market due to sustained low interest rates following the financial crisis of 2008.
One way the council is spending the discretionary money is to improve Parsons’ water and sewage systems. According to council member Timothy Auvil, Parsons’ sewer and water lines were laid over a century ago, when Parsons first became a town. Auvil said that when he joined the council after being recruited in his bean patch 14 years ago, “we only had a 52% accountability rate,” meaning about half of Parsons’ water was leaking out of the pipes before ever reaching residents’ taps. Now, Auvil said, after replacing many of the lines, Parsons has a 75% accountability rate–one of the highest in the state.
Currently, Parsons is working with The Thrasher Group–an engineering firm from Bridgeport– to make improvements to the sewer system, and to interconnect the water systems of Parsons and Hamrick so if either town has a contamination issue, one can supply the other’s water. In this case, Auvil said, Parsons used $50,000 dollars from the Harman Fund to pay for the engineering plans for the combination project. The state then kicked in a $676,000 dollar grant that Auvil said they would have never supplied had Parsons not been able to put up part of the money thanks to the Harman Fund.
The committee heard reports from city employees. Chief of Police Kevin Keplinger said his office had recently learned about a new drug he described as a methamphetamine isomer called “utilore, or street name ‘boot’.” According to information Keplinger received from officers in Martinsburg and Petersburg, “heroin addicts are the ones targeting it. They say it makes people act like zombies.” The council members moaned, and encouraged Keplinger to purchase two hard vest sets totaling $703 dollars that Kepliger had requested for drug raids.
Last, some discord broke out over who is allowed to hire city employees. Council member Amy Wagner said she wanted to see the applications for the still-open City Administrator position left vacant by Jason Myer, who is now the General Manager of the Clarksburg Water Board. Mayor Judy and council member Bruce Kolsun rebuffed her, saying that there has always been a special hiring committee that makes those decisions, which she is not on. “Well I want to be on it,” Wagner insisted. “When are you guys going to make up your minds?” Kolsun apologized for being sick, and said they planned to interview candidates that Friday.
