MONTICELLO — During the Human Resources Committee on Thursday, October 16, the Legislature voted to reorganize the staff of the Information Technology Services (ITS) Division as proposed by ITS Commissioner Lorne Green. 

The move will abolish three vacant positions (Senior PC Specialist, Documentation Specialist, and Senior Network Engineer) and use the funds to create three new positions (Client Support Technician 1, Client Support Technician II, and Wide Area Network Technician II). 

The reorganization will effectively give three current employees a promotion with more competitive salaries and save the county $285,432.37. 

According to Green, the proposal comes after the ITS Division continues to train and subsequently lose employees to more competitive salaries elsewhere, creating vacancies in the department. These losses in personnel also represent a costly cycle of Sullivan County investing time, money and resources into the development of skilled employees who then take their new expertise and experience in government with them to a higher-paying position.

Green shared the circumstances surrounding the loss of a Senior Network Engineer who left his position paying $78,000 for a lower level network engineering job at New York State Board of Elections in Albany, which has a starting salary of $86,000 with a guaranteed five-year step up to $120,000. “How do you compete with that?” Greene retorted.

Green said, “We’re losing a darn good individual, and he’s doing what’s best for him, I can’t blame him for doing what he did. But we’re hurting for it. We spend the time training him, we spend the time giving him the experience in the government sector, and he moves on to greener pastures within the same government structure.”

Since March, Green’s department has been trying to fill another vacancy in the position of Application Relevance Support. Green expressed hope about a recent candidate: “On paper, from my perspective, [he] would have been absolutely perfect for the job, perfect for the department, perfect for the county.” After he failed to show up for his Monday morning interview, Green discovered that the candidate had sent an email on the previous Friday saying that he had accepted another position. 

The starting salary for the position in Green’s ITS department was approximately $76,000, but the candidate found the same position with the same responsibilities in the private sector with a salary of $130,000 and gave him the opportunity to travel abroad and work remotely. Green said this is why he wants to reorganize the staff structure and incentivize them to stay. “I worked really hard over the last 20 years to develop a really good staff, and I’ve got a really good staff now… I don’t want to lose them.”

A public comment by resident Ken Walter addressed Green’s frustrations: “We have a problem in Houston, as they say, and the Legislature of present and past have refused to recognize it. Afraid to pay their people appropriate salaries for positions that exist. We try to balance the budget on the back of our employees and still want those same services.”

District 7 and Vice Chair Legislator Joseph Perrello quickly responded to Walter’s criticism, saying, “We are not doing that, we are trying to be as fair as possible. We have unions and contracts to negotiate. That’s what we do.”

After public comment ended, Perrello expanded on his earlier objection to Walter’s characterization: “People are saying we’re not being fair to employees, health insurance, but these folks have unions, we negotiate in good faith and we’re trying to be as fair as possible and do what we have to do to make everybody have a quality of life here.” 

Committee Chairman and District 3 Legislator Brian McPhillips provided some context: “Obviously there’s been some tensions with the upcoming budget process.” McPhillips described the difficult balance that legislators must strike in meeting tax caps passed down from the state while also paying their employees competitive rates and providing residents with services. “We have the best of the best working for this county, they have all the taxpayers’ interests, in my opinion, at heart, and I think the budget that we’re going to provide is to best serve the people of the county,” said McPhillips.

The debate over employee salaries, union negotiations, and budget restraints was particularly poignant after earlier comments by County Treasure Nancy Buck who reported a decline in sales tax revenue for the County of “just under $4 million,” as compared with last year at the same time. Buck said, “When they bring out their budget and you see there’s a tax increase, it’s not because county employees are getting paid so much more.”