Next week’s Jefferson County Quorum Court meeting should be interesting.
At the direction of County Judge Gerald Robinson, there is a hiring freeze in force. One might not know that from listening in on the court’s committee meeting on Tuesday evening, which is a sort of meeting-before-the-meeting exercise the members use to plow through some of the items coming before them the next week at the real quorum court meeting.
At that committee meeting, various department heads came forward to ask for permission to supersede the hiring freeze and fill a position that they consider crucial. Sheriff Lafayette Woods Jr. asked for, what was it, five positions to be filled? We lost track. All of the JPs got on board with one of the fills, a cook for the jail – well, they gotta eat — while the other requests got mostly yes votes.
Granted, at this committee meeting, JPs are simply moving items to next week’s agenda, so a yes or no vote now doesn’t mean that’s how they will vote later. But if they were going to use the committee time to filter through some of this stuff, this would have been the time to draw a line and say they were absolutely not going to fill these spots.
This comes at a time when the judge has not only been reminding folks that there is a hiring freeze right now, but he’s also been preaching to the JPs and department heads that the county needs to lose a few employees, cross train the ones remaining and, otherwise, become more efficient.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Justice of the Peace Conley Byrd apparently took all that to heart and was vocal in his no votes, saying, this isn’t going to be easy and now is the time not to fill some of these spots and, instead, cross train other employees to make sure all of the duties are carried out.
“We have a hiring freeze, but I haven’t heard anyone say no but me,” Byrd said. “A hiring freeze that we all agreed to before this time.”
But the yes votes were thicker, and these hiring proposals will now be considered at next week’s meeting, creating yet another opportunity for department heads to express their irritation in public with the judge’s urgings to get more creative and efficient in how they run their departments.
From a communications standpoint, the judge should have tried harder to get some of these department heads on board with the plan, but there’s not much time for that between now and next week’s meeting. Perhaps they will take him up on his offer to come visit him one-on-one and go over his proposal. And that is what he calls it — a recommendation, if you will, certainly something short of an edict.
There are two issues here. One is the hiring freeze and the question of whether there is one for real or does it mostly just get ignored. And the other is whether the county is actually going to try to lose some personnel and become a leaner, smarter operation.
That’s all yet to be seen. Stay tuned.