Malia Riggs
Elmore Autauga News
Tuesday evening, the Autauga County Commission heard from a secondary attorney representing the Autauga County Sheriff regarding the mold remediation situation in the Autauga County Jail.
Autauga County Sheriff Mark Harrell is also represented by Trey Richardson III at The Law Office of Dwight M. Richardson III, LLC. The secondary attorney for Harrel, William P. Gray Jr., is the founding partner of BG&A Attorneys at Law and addressed the Commission Tuesday evening.
Gray stated that they want to be cooperative on every matter involving the remediation of the mold within the jail, and that they have no plans on filing any lawsuits against the county.
“We want you to feel free to communicate with the sheriff. In fact, we ask that you do communicate with him on things that you want to know the answer to. We want you to know that we are not adversarial. We don’t have a lawsuit filed against the county. We don’t contemplate filing any lawsuit against the county. We don’t have any agenda other than to try and make sure that the remediation is done in such a way that anybody that goes into the Autauga County Metro Jail is protected, including all of you,” Gray said addressing the Commission.
Harrell evacuated all prisoners from the facility on June 6 of this year placing inmates in other facilities due to ongoing concerns with moisture and mold within many areas of the jail.
At the August 6 meeting the County Commission approved a bid to Stallings & Sons Inc. for the cleaning and remediation of the Autauga Metro Jail, phase one. This is after over a month of back and forth and controversy over the evacuation of the jail.
Gray also stated that some of their concerns were from the first day of the remediation, where the remediation team allegedly did not have any personal protective equipment on, which is required by the EPA.
“We just want to make sure everybody including the employees of the remediation company are kept safe,” Gray said.
County Administrator Scott Kramer confirmed that their field representative from PH&J had come out to review the cleanup of the remediation phase and stated that they are on schedule and that the process is about 40% complete.
The commission had no further comment at that time.
The County Commission also approved to adopt the 2025 budget for the county, passed in a resolution at Tuesday’s meeting.
They approved various budget adjustments for the county regarding the Autauga Emergency Management Agency, EMA, and for the county engineering department, budget adjustments for the Sheriff’s office as well as several adjustments for reappraisal.
