County’s personnel problems go back several years
By Roy Ockert Jr.
Jan. 31, 2015
Craighead County’s problems with paying its employees have been building for a long time, and they just got worse with a big turnover bringing several inexperienced county officials into office. The Quorum Court offered a possible solution in 2005 but ran into objections from more experienced officials.
Maybe a Quorum Court with a several new faces can deal with these issues more effectively, but the budget passed in December by the “old court” only makes things worse. As pointed out in a Sun editorial earlier this week, the JPs decided to give every county employee a $1,000 raise in 2015, regardless of merit.
That’s a terrible way of paying employees of almost any business, industry or institution. It only works well when all employees have the same responsibilities and expectations for production and when experience is not important.
The only thing you can do worse in personnel salary management is to give everybody a percentage pay increase. Even as a cost-of-living adjustment, that’s a bad idea.
Both methods of granting salary increases allow department heads to avoid tougher decisions on who deserves raises, how much the raises should be and who doesn’t get raises. In the process you reward bad employees the same as you reward good employees. Only seniority is important, and one of the best incentives for good work is muted.
As far back as 2002, the Quorum Court found that some county officials were allowing employees to pile up “comp time” for overtime work without restriction. A Sun audit found 11 employees who had accumulated more than 240 hours each, apparently in violation of federal labor laws. The county wound up having to pay a lot of overtime for which no money was appropriated.
That and other issues festered until 2005 when the Quorum Court inserted funding into the next year’s budget for a human resources director, an officer who would work with all offices of county government to develop and implement consistent, efficient and legal employee policies and practices.
The HR director could, for example, point out that a proposal to pay an inexperienced deputy clerk $4,000 more per year than any other experienced deputy clerks is not a very smart idea.
Of course, electing an inexperienced county official isn’t a smart idea either, but that’s another issue.
At least theoretically, an HR director with knowledge of all departments could be a great resource for every county office at budget time and all the time for county employees, maintaining personnel records properly, dealing with benefits issues, preparing job descriptions, etc.
Almost every good business of any size has an HR director, and the Quorum Court learned at the time that five of eight counties of the same relative size as Craighead already had HR directors.
Alas, county officials began suspecting almost immediately that the Quorum Court was trying to take over their “fiefdoms.” Even the county judge wasn’t behind the idea. “I do feel this is another level of bureaucracy, and I do think that it should be up to each elected official to handle their own hiring and firing,” Dale Haas said. “I think an HR office would become a big bureaucracy and grow and grow like all government programs do.”
Such short-sightedness is a symptom of the inefficiency that still plagues county government in Arkansas.
A couple of justices who had been solidly behind the idea suddenly changed their minds in the wake of county officials’ objections, and the position was never filled — at least not by a person with human resources responsibilities.
Year after year the Quorum Court has rubber-stamped across-the-board pay increases, sometimes using a specific dollar figure and sometimes using a percentage. In 2008 one justice served notice that he opposed such a concept by voting against a $1,000 increase, but he was a lone voice in the wilderness.
Perhaps the latest brouhaha will convince the court’s majority that something needs to be done. Finally hiring a human resources director and giving that person the authority and responsibilities to bring order to this chaos could be the answer.
But you can count on some opposition from the county officials themselves, each of whom is constitutionally independent. Most want to be able to hire their own friends and family members — sort of adding job security from the inside. But the Quorum Court has the purse strings.
An even better solution would be for the JPs to eliminate some of the elective county offices and make the county judge a real administrator. You can imagine how inefficient city government would be if every department head was elected and didn’t answer to the mayor. All you have to do is look at the county.
Amendment 55 gives each quorum court the authority to make county government more efficient through Section 2(b): “The quorum court may create, consolidate, separate, revise or abandon any elective county office or offices except during the term thereof; provided, however, that a majority of those voting at a general election have approved said action.”
A quorum court can eliminate an elective county office and make it appointive or combine it with another office.
Now that would take courage and foresight.
Roy Ockert is editor emeritus of The Jonesboro Sun. He may be reached by e-mail at royo@suddenlink.net.