CLEARLAKE >> The Clearlake City Council approved the hiring of four new employees as a result of Measure V. The new staff will help as the city continues a road repair project.
Clearlake Finance Director Chris Becnel said when Measure V started, the city had hired five people to help initiate the first phase. This first group put the dirt road grading team at full staff.
“Over the time period, the city has received the funds from Measure V and we are now at the point where we have sufficient funds to warrant the hiring of additional persons for Measure V,” Becnel said.
To have a complete working team for grading, Becnel said the city would need two flaggers, a grader operator, a dump truck operator, a motor operator, a roller operator, a water truck operator and two support personnel. This is the minimum requirement needed to safely handle grading in the city.
Four temporary workers are close to reaching their maximum hours. This is due to the Sulphur Fire and the extra work they had to put in on clean up and recovery.
“Temporary workers are limited to 960 hours a year. What happened with the Sulphur Fire is those workers had used up their hours much faster in a year than they would ordinarily because they were manning barricades and doing emergency work during the fire,” Becnel said.
Since Clearlake is looking to hire these current temporary employees, another reason Becnel said they’re starting the process now is to make sure all of the paperwork is completed before their hours expire.
“We don’t want to lose them to another jurisdiction and if we waited another month to do this and then had to wait for the recruitment process it is likely that we would lose these workers,” Becnel said.
He added that Measure V has provided more than enough funds to hire these workers
Clearlake Public Works Director Doug Herran said these workers will be doing anything that is road related and it is a broad spectrum.
“You aren’t just talking about grading roads or paving roads, you’re talking about all maintenance on all roads in the City of Clearlake,” Herran said. “I would like to hire one Operator and three Maintenance Workers to run the grading operations.”
He added that just because it is raining does not mean that the staff is not out there working on the dirt roads.
“We are continually going through our grinding pile and sifting through it and getting it to the consistency we want,” Herran said.
Grading season for the city is between the months of June and October and Herran said they are going to be hitting it hard this year.
