News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
White County Commissioners are considering financially rewarding the commissioners who are compliant with the state’s required commissioner training hours.
The proposal comes from Tennessee’s House Bill 2677 which states if a commissioner complies with the state’s training requirements of eight hours per year the county may reward the commissioner with $600. According to the state’s website, only eight of the fourteen White County Commissioners are in compliance. Commissioner Derrick Hutchings said the county could be penalized in the future if a commissioner does not meet the training requirements.
“They wanted to make it where you couldn’t run for reelection if you didn’t have your required training hours but I guess they didn’t have a legal stand to remove that,” Hutchings said. “But they are saying that it is going to possibly come up as an audit finding on our audits if we are not in compliance.”
Hutchings said the state is not forcing counties to adopt the bill and that the county could decide not to adopt it. Hutchings then said he would like to adopt the proposal as he believes it is a good incentive for commissioners to complete the training.
“I’ll tell you right now I scanned through probably 60 counties just scanning through trying to find ours and no county was one hundred percent compliant,” Hutchings said. “That’s why they think it is important and I feel like the state passed something for us to have this.”
The proposal being sent to full court will be the allocation of money for each commissioner and for those who are not in compliance, the money will return to general funds. Commissioner Dakota White said he is not for the proposal to pay commissioners who are in compliance.
“I appreciate the thought of incentivizing it,” White said. “I just know that come March and April we are going to be looking for $9,000 and I don’t necessarily think it should come to us.”
Some commissioners were questioning the tracking of training hours on the state’s website as many of them claimed some hours have not been tracked as they should be. Commissioner Roger Mason said he had a few concerns about the proposal.
“My other concern with it is when I looked at the list and that’s what Derrick and I were talking about if they have not been tracking this because I know what I’ve done and I know what Dakota’s done,” Mason said. “And it is not showing. If they are going to track it and hold us accountable for it then they need to make sure their tracking is not inaccurate.”
