Shelby Co. (ECWd) –
Hypocrisy is the word that comes to mind for the unilateral action taken by Shelby County Chairman Tad Mayhall and the current lease for the farming of the county farm ground.
During the prior board’s process of selling the farm, a resolution was passed that outlined that the County Chairman was commanded to sign all documents necessary or related to the sale of the property known as the Shelby County Farm. Current Chairman Mayhall ignored that specific point in his attempt to imply the chairman at the time, Bobby Orman, acted unilaterally when he hired an appraiser and surveyor for the farm ground. The point Mayhall tried to make was that a Board Chairman can’t just do things without board approval. We agree that it takes board approval for a chairman to act. In the above case, the board already gave that approval.
Who knew the winning bidder for leasing the Shelby County farm ground is not the person farming the ground?
The board voted on accepting the high bid and awarded the lease to Orville Eversol. The bid would have put $57,130.00 ($290.00 an acre) into the county general fund. There was no other vote taken for any other bids. See all the bids at this link.
However, Eversol is not the person farming the county farm as voted on. The day after the vote to award the lease, Eversol withdrew his bid, claiming a misunderstanding of the agreement. A few days later, Mayhall signs a lease with Tice Robinson.
There was no provision for what happens if a bidder backs out after being awarded the bid. While there are legal steps that could have been taken, Mayhall awarded the lease to the next highest bidder, which does two things.
The first being exposing his ignorance, or that of the State’s Attorney, if she advised such a move. With all the bids being made public, the smart move, and we would argue the legal move, would have been to start the sealed bidding process over. The reason is that everyone knows what those numbers are, so putting it back out for bid stands a great chance of people raising the bids because they know all the other bids, which means the county would have made more from the lease (even though leasing county farm land for a private purpose such as this still violates the constitution, even after the new statutory amendment because it did not address leasing county land for a private purpose).
The second is that Mayhall acted unilaterally and signed a lease with the second-highest bidder. There was no board vote for the lease to go to the second-highest bidder. No discussion, no approval to act, nothing. It is clear, the board never voted to approve a lease for $51,220.00 ($260 an acre).
Considering all the drama Mayhall tried to create with his false accusation of unilateral action being taken by the past chairman, it appears to be quite hypocritical of him to unilaterally enter into a lease that was never approved by the board.
Where is the outrage over Mayhall’s unilateral action?
We note that $51,220.00 is not even half of the $120,963.89 that could have been earned just the first year in interest on the $2,419,277.80 bid received during the attempts to sell the farmland. (These figures are based on a three-year CD at 5%, which was available at the time)
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