Starting July 1, Effingham County’s public works and roads department will be a county function.

Commissioners voted 5-1 not to renew the contract with OMI, who had been providing public works service to the county for nine years. With the move, OMI’s service will run out with the expiration of the current contract on June 30.

“We’re extremely disappointed,” said George Cartledge, sales director for CH2M Hill OMI. “We’ve had a successful partnership for nine years. When they have asked us, we have stepped up.

“We want to be here,” Cartledge added. “We want to continue this partnership.”

Each department — OMI included — had been asked to reduce its budget by 10 percent.

But county officials balked at how OMI’s cuts were achieved, citing they were planning to reduce their workforce rather than cutting its overhead.
County officials determined their cost of taking over the public works and roads at $1.53 million, though County Administrator David Crawley said there are still questions for the county to answer, particularly how it would structure the department and how to compensate a to-be-hired public works director.

OMI’s initial offer was $1.88 million and eventually was cut to $1,533,622 based solely on personnel costs.

“They were looking at their fiduciary interests to their constituents,” Cartledge said. “We looked as hard as we could to provide our quality services and our guaranteed services. Each year we provided more services than the previous year, and our costs have been flat.

“We’ve been providing them a good value.”

Commissioners praised OMI’s efforts during its service to the county. But in the push to reduce costs, the county assessed it could perform the duties more cheaply.

“We’ve been very, very pleased with OMI,” said Commissioner Verna Phillips. “We feel we’re in a position to take it over and save the taxpayers money.”

Commissioner Reggie Loper moved to accept OMI’s proposal, but his motion died for lack of a second.

“I think they can do it cheaper than we can,” said Loper, the dissenting vote in the move to take the work in-house. “I don’t think we can beat their price.”

There are 29 employees in the public works and roads department who likely will become county employees on July 1.

“We hope they offer them the opportunity to do this work for the county with a compensation package comparable to what they have now,” Cartledge said.