One month after approving a contract with an elected official to respond to Pennsylvania One-Call situations, Emsworth Council voted Wednesday to rescind that agreement.

The PA One-Call system requires anyone opening streets or other property to check first to see if there are any underground structures that have to be taken into consideration -- such as sewers, water lines, gas lines, etc. When a municipality is notified of a potential excavation, it generally has three days to mark the area in question. In an emergency, that time frame shrinks to one hour.

Emsworth’s public works department was responding to One-Call situations until December, according to council member Paul Getz. At that point some confusion arose over a borough ordinance adopted in 1985 that created a supervisory position, with benefits, in the DPW. Getz said that officials were told that the ordinance would require providing benefits for the borough’s part-time crew if they continued the One-Call responses.

Getz, who said he had been helping the DPW voluntarily with One-Call situations for several years, the assumed the full burden of addressing the calls. He responded to 11 calls in December, 14 in January, three in February, 10 in March, 16 in April, 11 in May, nine in June, and 19 in July, according to PA One-Call records.

Some of those calls were on weekends, others in the middle of the night, Getz said, and his volunteer efforts became time consuming.

Getz said that he had asked council members several months ago to address the situation and come up with an answer to the problem of having someone else respond to the calls.

In July, Getz proposed a contract with the borough that would compensate him for the calls he had addressed during the eight-month period and cover the borough for future calls. Getz said that he checked to see what other municipalities paid for the service, and came up with a rate of $25 per hour, with a two-hour minimum per call.

Although officials did not know at the time what the pay-out would be for the past eight months, they approved the contract. Getz said that he was not sure at the time how many times he had responded to calls, and turned to One-Call records maintained by the state before submitting an invoice for past work.

At $50 per call, the total came to $4,745, prompting council member Connie Taylor to label the agreement “an egregious abuse of power” at Wednesday’s council meeting. Getz was absent from that meeting, as were Tom Madey and Ken Kroen, who voted, along with council president Maria West, to approve the agreement in July.

Council member Alex Nalevanko maintained that the daytime calls could have been answered by the DPW, which contradicts Getz’s claim that the DPW would not answer the calls.

Nalevanko also pointed to several calls listed on the PA One-Call report that appear to have been answered at the same time on the same day. According to Getz, the time indicated on the report reflects when he entered the call into the computer system, not when the call actually was answered.

A motion by Taylor to rescind the agreement with Getz was approved in a 4-0 vote at Wednesday’s meeting. The vote comes too late, however, to stop payment of the invoices submitted by Getz, which were approved and paid based on the July meeting vote.