Alpharetta Council Debates New Hires at Workshop

publication date: Jun 16, 2008

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author/source: Jonathan Copsey / STAFF

By Jonathan Copsey / STAFF

The Alpharetta City Council asked department heads to appear before them to justify their requests for new employees at the workshop meeting last Monday. In total, the six proposed positions would cost the city more than $300,000 annually and make up the bulk of the fiscal year 2009’s new non-capital spending.

Engineering and Public Works director John Muskaluk easily defended his needs for a civil engineer and a GIS specialist. The civil engineer would primarily inspect storm water drains, a job that is now mandated by the Environmental Protection Department. Twenty percent of the city’s storm water utilities must be inspected each year. There’s not much room to argue with that.

The Geographic Information System (GIS) specialist would create a smoother operation of GIS usage within the city. Currently, according to Muskaluk, whenever an employee needs information provided by the GIS system, they have to work it out by themselves, gathering data and inputting it only for it to become outdated or useless due to never being updated. With a dedicated specialist, the data can be continually maintained.

“No matter what data is collected, if it is not maintained it becomes stale,” said Muskaluk. The specialist would keep the information up to date in order to save employees’ time inputting information over and over.

Public Safety Director Gary George presented his request for one new hire and one sort-of hire. The new hire would be an administrative assistant for the fire department headquarters.

“It’s all about customer service,” said George, describing the need for the assistant. Currently, the fire officers answer calls and requests for information only when they are not “in the field.” The assistant would be charged with manning the phones and making appointments.

The second hire requested for the public safety department would simply be to upgrade a current part time job into a full time job. The logistics officer would be responsible for ordering uniforms and repairing vehicles. The man who has been doing it on the side for some time now has been caught in the unfortunate dilemma of living in Johns Creek and working for the Fulton County Fire Department full time. As the Johns Creek fire department is scheduled to come online soon, unless the man retires from the department, Fulton County will move him to the south of the county, which he does not wish to do. Alpharetta would like to hire him full time in order to keep him doing what he has been for so long. 

“He’s been a really good asset,” said Council member Jim Paine, who knows the gentleman in question, “and he will continue to be so.”
   
A Victim of IT’s own Success
Randy Bundy, of the Information Technology Department, presented his two new hires to the Council. It was an uphill battle, as the discussion revolved more around the million dollars in budget requests IT had asked for than the hires.

The positions – a full time network analyst and a part time administrative assistant – would be, according to Bundy, necessary additions to the fledgling department. Under current working conditions, each member of the IT department is essentially the last line of defense against a major problem. For instance there is only one person in charge of all email requests and functions; should that person leave or get sick, there would be no one to fix a problem.

With the addition of another network analyst, the current employees would no longer be performing multiple jobs by themselves. There is currently no administrative assistant for the department, which just adds to the workload of the employees. With the city centralizing more systems – such as records management – in the IT department, Bundy argued that the staff members are being stretched to their limits without new hires.

“The expectation is that we have the industry standard,” Bundy said, pointing out after his presentation was cut short by Council that IT has done quite a lot for a department of its size and has still managed to keep costs low, compared with other cities’ IT departments. “In order to give the city a reliable and well-managed system at the level that we’re at now, these are the steps to take. We are not in a place to go on operating where we want to be.”

He believes the new hires will be a step in that direction, but Council was already wary of the high cost that the department had asked for in the budget for data, communication and records systems.

“Right now what you’re giving me is more cost,” said Councilman D.C. Aiken. “Technology should make less cost.”

The rest of Council seemed to agree.

“At some point in time the rubber has to meet the road,” said Councilman Doug DeRito. “And I don’t think you’ve met the threshold of demonstrating the value of the million dollars more in expenditures to the IT budget to the city’s taxpayer.”

It was only Mayor Arthur Letchas who jumped to Bundy’s defense.

“I think we’ve shortchanged IT,” Letchas said. “You’ve [the council] asked Randy to come in and make recommendations for what we need to get it up to par. This is the minimum amount of people he needs to make the city run. This is the year for IT, but this impacts the whole city and how the city runs efficiently.”

Because it was a workshop, the Council waited until Thursday’s meeting to vote on the personnel requests. The budget was passed unchanged in a 4-1 vote at that meeting.

Wills Park Signage
Ben Sams, president of the Wills Park Youth Baseball Association, asked the Council for permission to put up advertising at the baseball fields at Wills Park. The Recreation and Parks Commission had already heard the case and suggested approval. 

The desire for signage is, according to Sams, to eliminate the club’s debt before Sams’ retirement from the group. The debt was created by the building of a concession stand that the city helped pay for. The association still has $50,000 in outstanding loans that were taken out to help the group pay its share of the building costs.

Paine was the only councilmember openly against the signage, saying that they would destroy the feeling and view of the park to have a hundred signs on the property. Also at issue is that the signs would only benefit the baseball association. Other sports groups would not get the proceeds of any signage; with the precedent set, they could demand their own signs.

The argument in support of the signs was strong, as Aiken pointed out. Virtually every single other sports entity everywhere (except Roswell) uses signs in their fields. “The Braves and the Falcons do it, and they don’t need money,” he said. “These will help to improve the parks and lessen the taxpayer burden.” 

With such reasonable arguments on both sides, the other Council members were largely ambivalent about the issue. Councilman David Belle Isle suggested that the issue be brought before the public to decide at a Council meeting.