Leeds Council enlists new audit firm, hears police report

Source: The Trussville Tribune
Author: Nathan Prewett

LEEDS - The Leeds City Council held a short meeting on Monday, April 1, where it voted to enlist the services of another audit firm and heard a report from Police Chief Paul Irwin, who briefly mentioned the church fire in Leeds that occurred in February.

While hearing reports from department heads, Police Chief Paul Irwin said that he and Sgt. Coney Phillips attended the first law enforcement summit on elder abuse ever held, which was in Washington D.C. in February.

"We obtained a wealth of information that we not only brought back to our department but also brought back to the whole state of Alabama," he said. "So that was an honor for us."

He said that SROs will begin accompanying student athletes to cities with an uptick in violence, citing an incident in one city where a game involved a shooting perpetrated by a student's mother after an argument broke out.

Notably, he reported that some suspects in the case of the Pathway Baptist Church fire have been identified and that they are working with the district attorney, but as the suspects are juveniles no additional information is being given out at this time.

The church was an abandoned building that had been previously known as Leeds First Baptist before being renamed Pathway. The council voted to declare it a public nuisance in order to clean up the ruined site.

Miller said that the city government has been determining the costs to perform the work, specifying that so far they have "just north" of $150,000. He added that they should know the final costs by the next meeting of the council.

Additionally, Irwin said that the department obtained 14 search warrants in January and 28 in February.

"That's not only because of the investigators but the officers identifying crimes that need to be investigated," he said. "And then our detectives take it a step further to investigate those crimes and make sure that we're protecting our cities and also the businesses, because a lot of these arrests are people taking advantage of businesses."

At the beginning of the meeting Mayor David Miller addressed a situation at a playground in which an equipment piece was thought to pose a danger.

In his comments, Miller said that a slide in the playground had developed a jagged hole, leading to comments on social media about it posing a danger to children though he said that this was not the case.

Since the hole was discovered that portion of the slide has been blocked until it can be resolved. The city engineer is currently working to get bids on having the slide replaced, he said.

"It's very expensive," he said. "But it's served us for many years, and we will be replacing it as soon as we get a quote. I say it's expensive, it's quite a bit more expensive than when it was originally installed because of all the rules have now to make it ADA-compliant."

Later in the meeting the council voted to engage with Rivertree Systems as a private collection and auditing firm. This is in addition to the services of Avenu, with Rivertree to provide for smaller businesses in the city.

"Our auditing firm is doing a really good job," Miller said of Avenu. "They're a very large corporation, and [Rivertree] gives us an opportunity to have a smaller, more intimate type of relationship in our auditing system."

"Rivertree would be an adjunct to the audit collections system provided by Avenu. This doesn't cost us anything but it does provide a service that's more in tune to our mom and pop businesses, our smaller business without a huge firm coming in."

In other business the council:

Meetings are held on the first and third Mondays of every month at City Hall on 1400 9 Street Northeast. Agenda packets can be seen online at the City of Leeds website.