Brookfield Trustee Dan Suttles said he has no qualms with the work Taub’s Lawn Care of Brookfield has done maintaining the township green, the administration building and along Route 82 in front of the administration building.
The company does a great job and takes pride in its work, he said.
However, Suttles said it’s time to bring those chores back in-house. Trustee Ron Haun and Gary Lees didn’t agree and hired Taub’s back for another year.
Suttles said the township road crew can do the job, and can do the job just as well as Taub’s, and he thinks it’s a fair trade-off for hiring a fifth full-time member of the road crew.
“We’re spending money that I don’t believe we need to be spending,” he said of the roughly $6,000 the township pays Taub’s. “We have the ability to do it ourselves.”
Road Supt. Jaime Fredenburg likes to outsource the work to take one job off his plate, Suttles said.
Lees said it’s imperative that the green be well taken care of as it is in an historical district.
“As far as expertise and maintaining the historical district, and I’ve expressed this many, many times, we’re very, very fortunate to have an historical district, the only one in the state of Ohio, as a township – all the others are cities – to have that as your foyer of your township, as people come in to our township and they look, see, ‘This looks like a nice place for my family to live,’” Lees said. “That’s our center point of the township. We need to have expertise from people like Taub’s to maintain that green.”
Taub’s does jobs the road crew didn’t do when it maintained the green, such as blowing grass off the sidewalks and pruning bushes, Haun said.
promo“I think having that type of a service is worth it for what we’re getting out of it,” Haun said. “He takes exceptional pride in doing that. I don’t think they’re (township employees) gonna give it the loving care that he gives.”
Fiscal Officer Dena McMullin said she typically would side with Suttles, noting, “I don’t like spending money.”
Yet, the township is in a difficult situation with many businesses closed or on reduced operations and people out of work, said McMullin, whose family owns Yankee Run Golf Course.
“I just think it’s a local company, it’s somebody that we are supporting,” she said. “Being a business owner, we’ve all suffered to some extent, and I just think that that’s a good faith gesture.”
The trustees hired John Welsh as the fifth full-time employee in the road department. He has done seasonal work for the township on and off for several years, and he will mainly work in the cemetery between May 4 and Nov. 1, then be folded into the regular road department schedule the rest of the year.
Welsh, of Brookfield, is being hired at $13 an hour but can earn a raise to $14 an hour is he gets a Class B commercial driver’s license, and another hike to $15 an hour if he gets a chemical spraying license.
The trustees also hired John “Jeff” Stiftinger of Masury as a seasonal cemetery worker for $11 an hour. He will work from May 4 through Nov. 1.
In past years, the trustees have just hired two seasonal workers, and sometimes have to pay unemployment to them after they are laid off.