When mayor wanted to really think deeply about pickleball, he hung out with pickleballers: That and other insights right here. Hear the Mayor tell Council Member Mosley: That's none of your business.
Please enjoy the transcript of the juicy portion of the Maumelle City Council meeting, hand-crafted and professionally curated by the Moniteur de l’Arkansas.
By Jay C. Grelen, Moniteur de l’Arkansas
The question at hand at Monday night’s Maumelle City Council Convocation was whether the job of mayor is a full-time job. Weeks earlier, Council Member Steve Mosley had gone in search of the answer. The result was Resolution 2024-25, which Mr. Mosley offered for a vote at the meeting.
Mr. Mosley had heard over the months that perhaps Mayor Caleb Norris is away from city hall more hours than he is there. He also received information that the mayor breeds and sells pythons, which led some to wonder whether Mayor Norris is a part-time snake handler on government time. Mr. Mosley asked questions, and consulted elected City Attorney Andrew Thornton, who in turn consulted the Arkansas Municipal League. The League’s guidance formed the foundation for this resolution.
The population of Maumelle is close to 20,000 with a budget that of millions. The mayor’s salary is $103,000 and change, plus a generous package of benefits. Free parking in a parking lot that is monitored 24 hours a day (by the mayor, who can check cameras all over city hall from anywhere on the globe. And he does. He also can lock the front door of city hall remotely.) The city picks up residential trash with state-of-the-art trash trucks. The city owns all manner of humongous earth-moving machinery. Maumelle has a community center with a swimming pool, basketball courts, elevated walking track, and exercise gym. And brand-new pickle-ball courts.
All that, and somebody wonders whether the mayor should work full-time?
The discussion Monday night didn’t lead to sparks, but the debate ginned up some tense moments between Mr. Mosley and Mayor Norris, who resists even a hint of oversight. He meandered and bloviated, hemmed and hawed his way through the debate, never answering any question but this one, to which we already the answer: He’s going to do whatever he wants to do. By the end, he had blown more smoke than one of the vaping pipes he hides somewhere in his hands and on which he puffs once in a while. He had blown so much smoke Monday night that six of the Mayor’s Rubber Stampers yanked the teeth right out of Mr. Mosley’s resolution. But the victory ultimately is Mr. Mosley’s because his work elicited information that we didn’t know for sure before Monday. And this is just the beginning. Release the unraveling! Thank Steve Mosley and a platoon of loyal Maumellians to be identified later.
Things we didn’t know for sure before Monday night:
Mayor Norris hates acccountability.
Mayor Norris breeds and sells pythons.
Mayor Norris did much heavy thinking about pickleball.
Here is Resolution No. 2024-25, and after that, please enjoy the transcript of that portion of the meeting, hand-crafted and professionally curated by the Moniteur de l’Arkansas staff. Even better, watch and read along.
Resolution Number 2024-25
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The transcript
Mayor: Council Member Mosley, this was your resolution, so I’ll let you introduce it.
Mosley: Yessir. This was simply to, uh, I think the intention of the salary committee was to, the hundred-four, hundred-seven-thousand dollars, whatever it was, if it was to be a full-time salary, so the effort here is to make that clear that’s what that is. I was going to do it in the form of an ordinance, but we called the Municipal League. The city attorney talked to the Municipal League. They, uh, uh, basically suggested we just do it in the form of a resolution. So that’s what we ended up with. If you have any comments you want to make on it, go ahead and proceed.
Mayor: Where di… um … so that was the first thing I noticed is it’s a resolution and not an ordinance. So I asked (chuckled) the city attorney why it was a resolution and not an ordinance when I know, Council Member Mosley, one of your initial goals, as you stated, was to, like, “If it says the city attorney is a full-time position, and the city clerk is a full-time position, why is it silent on the mayor’s office, so let’s just make them all equal.”
I said, “If we’re not supposed to have an ordinance for the mayor, are we allowed to have an ordinance for the city attorney and the city clerk.” (laughs) I presented that question to the city attorney (laughs) not too long before the meeting today, and so I’d like for you to explain, why are we looking at resolution versus ordinances? And then, are you aware of any exceptions that allow for an ordinance for the city attorney and city clerk. Talk to us a little bit, Mr. Thornton.
Andrew Thornton: I did speak to an attorney at the Municipal League on this. Part of the issue is if you make it an ordinance, is there any remedy that the city council would have if – not this mayor but some future mayor – violated the ordinance, didn’t work full-time, something like that.
Well, I’m sure as you all know, your remedies against elected officials, both (between) one another and the mayor and the city clerk and myself, are very, very limited by state law. There is a very small time period in which you can do a recall. Then there is a constitutional provision for charging somebody with impeachment. Then there are a few, scattered kind of fraud crimes for public employees that also say, at the very end, “and the person shall be removed from office.”
So there’s no real mechanism. So if there’s no remedy for it, is it even proper to make it part of an ordinance as opposed to a resolution?
Another odd thing, is that … So state law is silent on it, as to whether it should be, whether the job is full-time or part-time, except for city-administrator cities. The statute on those says specifically that the mayor’s role is not a full-time job. And there is a principle of statutory interpretation that if the legislature uses language in one place but not another place, you can infer something from that, sometimes. So we have the fact that there’s not really an enforceability.
Caleb breaks to me at this point, should the ordinances about the city attorney and the city clerk be changed? (laughing) I don’t know. (indecipherable) I think the issue of the enforceability is really the most persuasive from my perspective. Regular people, if you say, there’s really nothing you can do about that, if the mayor’s not doing their job, your options are pretty limited. Well, that’s just the way that the law is. The General Assembly can certainly change that, and give cities and counties an extra authority, if they want to, but as it stands now, you really only have a few options if you are confronted with an elected official that’s not doing the job, not doing the duties.
There’s certainly authority for councils to add duties to the mayor’s job, to the city clerk’s job, to the city attorney’s job. There’s certainly authority for that. But as for making that a full-time versus part-time, I don’t think there’s much, other than, which is something we’ve mentioned previously, by virtue of the size of the salary, by virtue of adding employee benefits, to the job, you basically signal that it is a full-time position.
Mayor: Thank you sir. I’ll go ahead an open the floor for discussion. (pause) Council Member Gardner.
Chad Gardner: This resolution is really not enforceable. It just states the intent. Is my understanding there correct, Mr. Attorney?
Thornton: It states a sentiment or a feeling.
Gardner: I don’t want to be in the business of monitoring a future mayor’s hours (if) that means punching the clock in the office. I don’t want to monitor the mayor’s hours of when he’s punching in and punching out. The mayor can still do as he or she pleases in that sense. Yes?
Thornton: With the resolution?
Gardner: Yes.
Thornton: A resolution, generally speaking, is not equivalent to an ordinance, doesn’t have the force of law.
Gardner: It just states an intent.
Thornton: If you pass this, that would be kind of the city council putting their opinion on the record, that this is the expectation.
Gardner: Okay. Thank you, sir.
Mayor: Council Member Mosley.
Mosley: That’s what we’re doing here. You’re right. It’s not enforceable, but if it’s been passed, and we’ve got a mayor that is operating a restaurant, an insurance agency, something like that, where they’re gone three hours a day, attending to their business, then I think it gives the council a podium to say, “Hey, you’re not being fair to the taxpayers. The taxpayers are not getting their money’s worth.” So you could voluntarily say what percentage of your time you’re working at another job or on your own business. If it were me, I would reduce my salary. For example, if somebody’s retired, and they decide they want to be mayor, but they really don’t want to work full-time, this thing (resolution) here would say, it would give us the ability to say, “Look, if you’re only going to work part-time, your salary ought to be commensurate with that.” And reduce your salary. If it were me, and I was working only four hours, I’d only take half the salary. I think it kind of comes down to whether, do you think it’s okay for a mayor to, maybe, perhaps, rely on the chief of staff to run city hall, and just come in four hours a day. Is that right? That’s what you got to ask yourself. This thing, this thing just says, “Okay, you’re getting a full-time salary. We expect it to be full-time.” Mayor, you don’t have any objections to this thing, do you?
Mayor: I do, yessir. Not to the principle of the position being full-time, but to the principle that the city council is saying and telling the mayor what it is and where you should be at a given time, and when you’re allowed to leave the office, and not … Much like we talked about for the city council members’ position. A lot of the job just isn’t what you see there. Right? It’s the communications with residents, it’s getting out in the field and seeing things. In my case, I drive the city and report things on See, Click, Fix. There’s a number of things. So I object to the idea that the city council should be telling the mayor, “You need to be in the office between these hours and these hours, unless you have a meeting, an appointment, or things like that.”
(Meadering Alert: The King of the verbal meanderers is in rare form.)
I don’t play golf, but I can conceive of someone running for mayor who says, “You know what. We have too much government bureaucracy going on. I’m going to be a do-nothing mayor, and my goal is to go out to the golf course and hang out and play golf all day.” And that’s what they run on, and people elect them into that position for that. It’s an absurd example, but I’m trying to use that absurdity to say why I don’t think …
I also don’t think it’s the city council’s position to try to be a supervisor for a mayor. For example, with my office, for example, I don’t keep up with where each department head is at all times all day. I give them the latitude to come and go, but get your job done. And so that is how I measure things, not based on when they’re in the office or when they’re not in the office. And so I think there’s some philosophical differences that are there, and I object to the idea that the council should be telling the mayor what to do. But the council’s the policymaker for the city and can set out various duties. But it’s sort of how those things get done, I believe, rests in the person who was elected to that position.
Again, I don’t have any problem saying it’s full-time. Anyone running should know it’s a full-time job. I don’t like the idea that there is something that says the city attorney position is full-time, the city clerk position is full-time, but we’re just silent on that, right? I don’t like how that looks. I think it sends the wrong message. It doesn’t convey things accurately. So I’ve asked the city attorney to kind of look into this ide – if we’re not supposed to have an ordinance for the mayor, then let’s look into whether we’re supposed to have an ordinance declaring mayor ... or part-time for the city clerk and city attorney. Because if under the law, they’re all allowed to be equal, I think they should all be in that way. I don’t like the idea that we have things that say different things for those positions. If there’s no legal difference, then, I think that’s how that should be. Council Member Williams.
Terry Williams: I agree that it should all be equal across the board, but I also want to again say, we pay salaried employees for the job not by the hour. And if we’re going to clock in at 8 and leave at 4 or 5 every day, and make sure we get 40 hours, then we should be receiving overtime as well when we have to take a call or go out and look at flooding, and look at all various things that go on in the city, then. I know you do, and more than just come to the meetings. I do agree that there probably should be an ordinance that matches the city attorney and the city clerk. I think it should be fair across the board. And I don’t believe that we should be dictating your hours. I don’t like that at all. And if I could, Mr. Mosley, you’re going to say something. I want to add this. There are certain things that if you told me I have to be in the building to do, or I could do them in private, it’s going to be far less productive if I have to be in my office during the middle of the day. If I’m supposed to be reading something, or writing something, or doing these sort of deep intensive things where constant interruptions are counter(productive), where those interruptions are really going to set you back, you don’t want a rule that says you have to do those in this building. Or it’s a rule saying, “Do this unproductively, but be seen in your office.” I wanted to say that before you (indecipherable). Council Member Mosley.
Mosley: Are you saying you do some remote work yourself, is that right?
Here he admits, without apparent embarrassment, that he conducted his research and did his heavy thinking about – pickleball – away from the office.
Mayor: I think, yes, absolutely. I argue that half of my job is not in this building. Half of my job is things like ... I had a ton of ideas and thoughts about the pickleball program that I never had thought of before, and I got those by hanging out with people who played pickleball. And they were sharing their opinions.
(This silly justification withers under even the slightest exposure to rational thought. Questions: The city sponsored a pickleball night at the community center and solicited written opinions from pickleball players. How much more advice did he need? How many hours did the mayor spend away from city hall consulting with pickleball aficionados? And since the city didn’t have any public pickleball courts, where did he go to hang out? A private court in Maumelle? Sherwood? Tell us three ideas, mayor, that you picked up while hanging out on pickleball courts.)
If you want to know what people think about our parks, go hang out at the parks and talk to the residents. (Seriously, Mayor, how many hours have you spent hanging out in parks for research?) See how different things are being used. And so (laughs), a lot of my job is things outside of the building. I think that, yeah, that, and, you have email and the ability to work from phone and outside. In fact, See, Click, Fix is – I try and circle the city (how many times a week? The image of the mayor driving around in circles is apt.), and my goal is to catch things before people complain about them. I very rarely succeed, but that’s one of my goals, and I hope it’s one of y’all’s goals, too. Please report things on See, Click, Fix. We’re really renewing our efforts to hone in on those. But that’s an aside. Yessir.
Mosley: One of the reasons, I have anticipated that elected employees would eventually begin trying to work remote quite a bit, and I really don’t think that if it’s something you could be doing here in the office, like writing a report or whatever, I really think you should be here and available as opposed to home or wherever. So, I think that’s going to be an issue coming down the road, for every city really. Because of the internet, you can work remote to a great degree. That’s what I do. I don’t go into an office. (stumbles over words).
Mosley: Mayor, do you have a part-time business or anything like that that you operate? Or do you have another business?
Mayor: Nossir.
(I’m pretty sure, based on his answers to the next question, that the mayor just lied on the stand – or in this case, while siting in the mayor’s chair – to Council Member Mosley, although notice he really doesn’t answer the question.)
Mr. Mosley: I had a resident the other day call and say that you are operating an animal business, snake business.
Mayor: So they’ve read my divorce paperwork.
Mosley: Yes. Yeah they had.
Mayor: I own pets, uh, and someone, yeah. That was referred to in that paper work as a business.
Mosley: Okay, do you still do that?
(He’s a bit defensive here, resisting oversight, which is typical, and expects the populace to trust his word.)
Mayor: Do I do that? I don’t think that’s any of your business. It takes precisely zero hours during any work day whatsoever. So what I do in the evening or my free time is up to me.
Mosley: I would agree with that. But I would also say that if you’ve got another business during the office hours, like what I’ve got in that resolution, it should be dedicated to that business, which is the city. But I’ve got to take you at your word. I’m not a fly on the wall. I don’t know what’s going on.
(The master deflector. He declares that he’s made nothing at his business in 2024. But that doesn’t mean, of course, he didn’t handle any snakes on the government clock; the only that statement tells us for sure is that he’s a lousy snake breeder.)
Mayor: To be clear, I have made zero dollars and zero cents in 2024.
Mosley: (Laughs.) Okay.
Mayor: So if I had, if you call that a business, then it’s a very unsuccessful business, which is why I don’t claim it as a business. It’s a hobby. (Sounds as if he’s admitting that he still dabbles in it, but since he’s no good at it, it doesn’t count as a business.)
Mosley: Okay. All right. That’s about it. I really do think we ought to go ahead and pass this. I do also see a consistency issue. We ought to either put in an ordinance that they’re all full-time or do a resolution like that for every elected employee position. Thank you.
Mayor: Madame City Clerk.
Tina Timmons, elected city clerk/treasurer, whose mother-in-law, Gloria Timmons, breached her Park on The River contract with Maumelle and stiffed the city for $38,000: I just wanted to briefly to say, according to Council Member Mosley, you’d actually be surprised, the culture here at city hall. Fortunately, I was able to create a way where we were able to work remote. Most of us, 99 percent of us, voluntarily come in the office when we could be working remote. I think this particular location, and this particular culture and atmosphere, we don’t work remote even if we have the option to. That’s not something that I’ve seen taken advantage of, and I’m pretty stingy with who has that sort of access. But because we all work collectively together, remote work is not really something that we relish or would want to have. I don’t think that’s an issue in this building.
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This is Jay Grelen. I hope you remember me from my Sweet Tea column in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. The state’s largest newspaper published the column for seven years on the front page of its Arkansas section on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday. That was a while ago. The newspaper business has changed. Now I’m a newspaper refugee clutching his manual typewriter and trying to stay afloat. I worked in the newspaper racket for 35 years, including stints at the Denver Post, the Lexington Herald-Leader, the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, and the Mobile Register. My last stop was a 10-year stay at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. In 2017, Governor Asa Hutchinson hired me as his senior writer; after nearly six years with Governor Hutchinson, I sharpened pencils and fixed bathroom faucets as chief of staff to the mayor of Maumelle (where I’ve lived for 21 years).
In August 2023, a year to the day after he hired me, Hizzoner Caleb Norris promoted me to Maumelle’s Chief of Staff Emeritus.
I have returned to writing for a living, and I am participating in the much balleyhooed rebirth of local journalism. The first mission of Moniteur de l'Arkansas is to chase the elected foxes away from the public henhouses, which belong to the constituents who voted them into office. Subscriptions are free, but paid subscriptions are available and welcome Before the end of the year, we will launch the literary Birdsong County Whistler exclusively for subscribers who choose the paid route.
I hope someone has noticed the ever evolving name of this publication. We went from Maumelle Monitor[ed] to Arkansas Monitor to Arkansas Moniteur to the current appellation, Moniteur de l'Arkansas. It’s been a crisis of identity, which is all the rage these days. At any rate, we have settled on a name, which reflects our French roots and our Southern global sweet tea perspective.
Thank you for reading, whatever you may think of the name and however you choose to participate.
~ Jay C. Grelen, Moniteur de l'Arkansas