And one other citizen spoke. Mr. Robert Queen, a State Registered Professional Civil Engineer specializing in building foundations stated that he wanted to clarify some items from an email he had provided to the CCS Board. Mr. Queen then described how the budget figures for the North Shelby School project had escalated from $10 million to $13.5 million without any public discussion from the CCS Board. That he had discovered even bigger problems with the foundation requirements for the new North Shelby School Project and thought the CCS Board ought to be made aware of it. Especially since it involved 105,000 cubic yards (7,500 big truckloads) of dirt that will have to be moved plus a large number of piers (sometimes called “pilings” that have to be “pile-driven” into the soil), all of which will add $Millions more to the construction costs of the North Shelby School Project. Mr. Queen went into inspection costs and stated inspectors should only be paid for the inspections they do, not by a percentage of total costs. Mr. Queen started his conclusion by stating that the CCS Board needed to be asking more questions. That the CCS Board had not been told everything and were not asking enough questions to get to the “whole truth” of the matter in order to be responsible to the taxpayers of Cleveland County. Mr. Queen reminded the CCS Board that they had never discussed in open session the so called “educational opportunities” of locating the North Shelby School at the James Love site and how that justified the additional costs. Mr. Queen told the CCS Board that they probably were not told the truth about the soil conditions at the construction site (although Mr. Queen had himself previously told the CCS Board about substandard soil conditions. Mr. Queen apparently was talking about the CCS Board not being told by their own people-apparently incompetent people or people who have been told to keep their mouths shut about problems, which represents a much deeper problem). Mr. Queen continued by saying the CCS Board probably were not told about unfair payments of somebody else’s property taxes on property CCS bought (in addition to paying over market value for the property), the CCS Board hasn’t been told the capacity of the new North Shelby School (a reminder of what the CCS Board did with the new Shelby Middle School-SMS was built for 800 students yet only 400 actually attend), then Mr. Queen stated the CCS Board probably had not been told they had already spent $1.1 Million on the new North Shelby School project before they had even broken ground.”
At this point Bully Phillip Glove goes ballistic again. As Mr. Queen had started his conclusion with “North Shelby Students deserve better than this,” Bully Glover, obviously angry, calls out “Mr. Queen your time is up.” Mr. Queen keeps on reading his last few words with Bully shouting that his time was up, you are out of order and pounding his gavel.
I was sitting up front and paying full attention to all of this. What I saw and heard was Bully’s loud voice and Bully’s loud banging that obscured Mr. Queens last few words. Bully appeared red faced and mad. When I requested this clip of the CCS video be copied for this article and looked at it myself, I immediately determined something was wrong with the video. It appeared to me the video was edited to lower the volume of Bully Glover’s outburst and much of Bully’s gavel banging was edited out.
I was not surprised as Bully is up for election and he most likely would not want such an outburst to be made public. So, I went to the end of the video to see how that was captured. In real life there was a closed session at the end of the meeting and then the CCS Board comes back into session to announce if any actions were taken and to close the meeting. None of that is in the final CCS video that is on the Official CCS Website.
Mr. Queen may be right about the CCS Board not being told about what is going on. In my opinion the CCS Board does not want to know what is going on so they can deny knowing about all these problems. And when people like me, Mr. Queen, Danny Blanton, Billy Scruggs and others bring up problems at CCS, Bully and his cronies all get mad as hornets and don’t want to talk about them. Bully and his cronies can be mad at me all they want. I report on what I see and what I hear. If Bully and his cronies want good reports from me, all they have to do is act like they have good sense, do the right things and quit wasting taxpayer money hand over fist.