Foley makes swift work of first 2018 council

By Jessica Vaughn
jessica@gulfcoastmedia.com

FOLEY – At the first council of the new year, held Jan. 2, the Foley city council quickly worked through the smaller agenda to kick off 2018’s work.

• The council approved a resolution in support of legislation requiring childcare and child daycare facilities be subject to licensing and regulation by the Department of Human Resources.

“We’ve talked about this before, and we had an issue here with childcare a while back,” said Council President Wayne Trawick. “We have a personal experience. I hate to put more regulations on them, but it’d help the problem. This is needed.”
According to Mike Thompson, city administrator, a summary released recently by the League of Municipalities puts this regulation as one of the top things they plan to implement.

The resolution comes after cases where childcare facilities have tried to find ways to get out of specific regulations.
“A typical legitimate church doesn’t give you an issue, but people use the religious component to get around the regulations,” Thompson said.

• The council approved an amendment to the pay classification plan for position changes in the Police Department.

“The good thing about this is, with the addition to the two officers you gave us in the budget, we’re really going to be able to strengthen our patrol division,” said Police Chief David Wilson. “It’ll be a better impact down the road. We’re also losing three officers to military deployments, lengthy military deployments, and so this will help nullify that somewhat. When we get those officers back in, with the changes we’re making here, we’re going to be in pretty good shape as far as strengthening our patrol division.”

Wilson states that this is critical at the present due to the growth that the city has been experiencing in recent years.

• The council discussed a potential resolution authorizing agreement among City of Foley, Symbol Health Solutions LLC, and Ascend Performance Materials LLC for shared utilization of Foley Employee Health Clinic. However, the council felt like the item did not have enough information currently for a decision to be made, and instead voted to carry the item over to the next meeting.

“I have a little bit of an issue with that,” said Trawick. “We are morphing away from our original purpose of providing services for the municipal employees and government entities, Riviera included. And the drawback is we want to help our industry, but we don’t want to compete with private enterprise on this either. It’s a complicated subject as far as I’m concerned. We really have to think it through, because once we do it, who else wants to join?”
Thompson stated that the issue was Ascend was interested in using Symbol as a clinic, but they did not have enough of an employment base to justify Symbol creating them a personal clinic. If approved by all entities, Ascend would be able to use clinics currently provided for Foley, Gulf Shores, and Orange Beach, leading Foley to discuss seeking opinions from other municipalities on the matter.
“I think we need to do a little bit more homework on this,” said councilman Ralph Hellmich. “Right now, we are only doing governmental entities, but once we opened the door, which I understand it would save us some money, but where would it end?”
The item is slated to be carried over to a meeting at a later date, after more information has been gathered.