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Nazareth, Pa., United States

Monday, October 13, 2014

Corrections Officer Has Cost Control Idea For Brown

John Callahan, when he ran for County Executive, said he would introduce Continuous Improvement. That's a way of improving operations, a little bit at a time, by taking the ideas of the people who are actually involved in the operations. Dana Grubb, a former Bethlehem administrator, has criticized the way this program has been applied in Bethlehem, but I think the concept itself is a good one. It has always been my experience that the people who actually do the work always have the best ideas for making things work better. But John Brown defeated Callahan for Executive, and emplyees don;t exactly have his ear.

Instead, Brown is wasting money on consultants. Most recently, he has spent at least $58,000 on a cost control consultant who knows nothing abot the County, and has managed to alienate everyone.

Had Brown actually spoken to the people who work for the County, he'd learn that they have some cost control ideas of their own.

Here's one idea from a Corrections Officer:

"The prison administration itself is top heavy. We have a director. A warden. That's all well and good. Here is where it gets heavy. We have a deputy warden of community corrections and a community corrections coordinator. We have a deputy warden of classification and a classification coordinator. We have a deputy warden of operations, an operations administrator, an operations maintenance administrator, and two secretaries that fall under operations. And we have a intake Lieutenant and an intake administrator. For years we have not been able to get an answer to a simple question. What does a deputy warden do that a coordinator can't do or vice versa? Why two people running the intake division? Most of these were created positions by Todd Buskirk*, and handed out to friends of someone you know well. Jim Onembo*. It's fact, not speculation. If you look at the portion of the home rule charter that established a department of corrections, most of these positions are not included. All fluff. If the administration was streamlined, you could easily have money to hire the real people who run the prison, officers. Whose salary by the way, is lower than coordinators, deputy wardens, etc"."

This corrections officer should buy a brief case and cell phone, call himself a consultant, and send Brown a $76,500 bill.

Blogger's Note: Todd Buskirk is the Warden. Jim Onembo is a former jail official who suddenly became Court Administrator. 

19 comments:

Anonymous said...

all lower employees complain there are too many bosses. nothing to see here, move on to the next laughable moment/pity party

Anonymous said...

grub finally got something right. CI was and is a joke as is the little princess that runs it

Anonymous said...

Finger pointing by a union under duress. Trim the fat and move on. It's a jail..act accordingly.

Anonymous said...

Lots of complaints, no specifics. He should send a proposal to a member of Council to amend the budget to eliminate the useless positions. Real savings could be had by closing the older section of the jail and sending sentenced prisoners out to other counties with excess capacity.

Anonymous said...

The jail has been ignored for decades..why worry about it now?

Anonymous said...

Brown didn't create the needless positions in question. Stoffa did nothing to eliminate them and left the mess for Brown. If Brown proposed to slash these positions, you'd accuse him of murdering a member of some deputy warden's family.

Bernie O'Hare said...

If this officer wore a suit and charged $100,000, Brown would say he is a genius. I personally think he is on to something.

Bernie O'Hare said...

"Lots of complaints, no specifics."

Are you nutz? he laid out a bloated prison administration and in a detailed way. If he claimed he was a consultant, Brown would want to pay him.

Anonymous said...

Its funny how everyone in the lower positons complain about their administrators. I wouldn't beleive any of this since its coming from a drisgruntled employee. The officers are pissed off because of all of the mandates and I don't blame them. However they should blame Mr. Brown instead putting blame on the administration. From what I have seen and heard the Jail as been running smoothly and I haven't seen any riots lately. So, it looks to me that the administration has done a good job. "There are always those who are angry who want to bring their anger to others...

Bernie O'Hare said...

It does seem a bit top heavy.

Anonymous said...

I have a better idea. If officers would come to work without abusing sick time and using workers comp frauduently the county would save hundereds of thousands of dollars every year. If the county was smart they would look into the abuse of sick time and workers comp claims not too mention the abuse of Family leave. Sure some our legit. However, most are pure abuse of this what was meant to be a program for those who are in of serious need and can't make it to work. Not for those who don't want to work. All of these abuses by correctional staff has caused many of the staffing problems at the Jail and not the administration. For once I'd like to see the Union be honest about the real reasons their is a high volume of overtime. Enough said !

Anonymous said...

@11:18 I hope you do realize that it is the officers that keep the prison running smoothly and they are the reason there has been no riots. The officers work the blocks and keep the inmates in check not the administration. @1:25 you do have some points. The abuse is a county wide issue not just a prison issue. If John Brown would hire the required number of officers that he budgeted for the number of call off from the over worked officers would decline.

Anonymous said...

It's the jail.Just keep throwing money at it and don't ask any pointed questions. You don't really want to hear the truth or deal with it anyway. Or do you?

Anonymous said...

There have been no riots. Is that the jails benchmark? Is that the jails mission/goal? Sit on the inmates at the lowest possible cost to the taxpayers and avoid trouble within the jail population? Just thought i'd ask.

Anonymous said...

Same is true in the Sheriff's Department. Way too many mid-level bosses who sit on their ass and refuse to do menial assignments unless they are being paid overtime. A bit of restructuring with shift start times and the on-call schedule would save the County a bundle since two officers must man a hospital detail around the clock. One day of hospital coverage is costing the County nearly $600 in overtime costs alone.

You can't handle the truth said...

It is funny to know that the officer has all the bright ideas on how to run the prison. I guess they figured this out between reading their newspaper and playing soduko /crossword puzzles. When they should be supervising the inmates. Not disagreeing that some positions should be eliminated, but you have no idea what it takes to run a jail. You can't get half of the officers to fill out the everyday paperwork or carry out their menial job duties without a grievance being filed. As far as the abuse of sick, workmans comp and FMLA, it is out of control and has brought morale down to an all time low. It takes a good officer that is exhausted from working repetative 16 hour shifts to one that feels they have lower their own work ethics, because they carry the load of the officers that abuse the system. It also doesn't help that the schedule the officers use already cost the public 250,000 with full compliment of officers and no one using sick, w/c, and FMLA. John Brown, the prison is not a place where you make big cuts and we are a endless money pit. We deal with housing people not paperwork. If you cut staff in another department the amount of paperwork completed slows. When you cut staff in prisons you upset the nature of things. Your dealing with non productive members society (people) and when they get upset the don't file a complaint they throw shit on you.

Anonymous said...

Time to privatize the prison.

Anonymous said...

How is privatizing the prison a viable solution? The biggest problem with privatization is that the contracted security company that is hired to run the prison takes a huge cut as profit and pockets it off the top and pays the guards that work for them to run the prison at $8.00 an hour. The county would basically say to the old guards that they can either train their replacements or continue to work their and keep their job with the new company at a reduced rate of $8.00 an hour. So at that point, All of the old guards would leave and you would be stuck with a bunch of $8.00 an hour guards that you are lucky aren't former inmates. Ones that have no clue what they are doing, and since they are only being paid $8.00 an hour, contraband being brought in and escapes from inmates going on transports will be more common. So, The taxpayers will still have to pay for it one way or another. With contracted privatized security, You get what you pay for. And if you think that people don't show up to work now, You just wait and see how many people show up to work when they are being paid $8.00 an hour. And what will cost the public money is the higher amount of escapes, riots, and contraband that go along with it.

Anonymous said...

well it's obvious from the information provided, that a lot of the "pro-administration" commentary is from the actual administration members who are looking at the guillotine (so to speak).

Speaking of "mandates" - why or how is it that these officers are out injured in the firstplace? Oh that's right....because the prison purchased TASERS and other compliance tools that they are prohibited from using. Prohibited from using? WHAT?! Yeah...not by [a written] policy but by direct orders/under DETERMINED IMPRESS from administrators. it costs money to replace those items as they are used.....so let's cut costs by simply not using them.

When the tools that are supposed to "significantly drop" injuries (to BOTH officers AND inmates) aren't used, guess those "OI" numbers should be climbing.

But wait.....why aren't they 'really' climbing? Oh that's right, it's not a prison facility.....it's one big daycare. Inmates having crochet class - crochet needles? REALLY? How about 80+ bible/religious studies per WEEK? That didn't include modifying a housing block DEDICATED to being a religious tier......"learn to be a mommy/daddy" classes and the administration's inability to realize that they have LOST TOUCH with what ACTUALLY goes on in the housing units. How about "favorite inmates" [to the administrators] who get major misconducts for GROSS violations of conduct.....simply a "time served" (somewhere around 3 days) and returned to population from lock-up? Theft from the kitchen? "NO, you CAN'T fire them for just that. Deduct their 'pay' for up to 3 days." Thank you Deputy Warden Kospiah for that by the way...that'll teach 'em not to steal....

How about a maintenance department that has to 'fix' things 5 times or more, because they don't know HOW to fix it properly in the first place? Ask Buskirk how many times they patched the ceiling in the visiting room before the actual problem (leaking roof/skylight) got repaired......or how the battery packs on the back up generators held up when the prison was without power for over a week. Oh that's right....those "emergency generators" never kicked on because the battery packs were DEAD.

How about those mushrooms growing out of the ceiling in the dining room? Or the fact that there are STILL dead spots all over the prison.....where an officer can only get help if...and I mean IF...they hit a wall-mounted panic button? "Oh there aren't any radio dead spots here..."...that's what they try to tell the officers anyway....

How about officers who have to teach their administrators how to do the job? (going back to Intake Administrators) Since when is it the officer's responsibility to train their bosses??

There are lazy officers and there are also overbearing ones....and then there are Lieutenants who let their friends slide when they are late for work (over and over and over) while others write up people who were punched in before their report time.....

How about workplace harassment? Oh well if you are one Lieutenant, it's ok to randomly select someone to "pick on" (and get away with it FOR YEARS).....but when officers file appropriate complaints about it....they are targeted for further scrutiny and have to walk on "eggshells" for fear of further reprisals?

The list of crap is long and goes back 2 decades....WAY too much to post here.

....and NOW we have a County Exec who, if his proposals go through, should be charged with raping every employee in the County.

So tell us again how it's "sour grapes" administrators....I have NO problem spilling more to the presses....