City Floats County Jobs, Pays Delinquent Lynx Taxes
On the heels of city officials recently voting to fork over $1.4 million to bail out libraries and prevent the wholesale shuttering of branch locations, the Charlotte City Council on Monday night extended another dose of largess when it approved an agreement that will save a handful of county jobs.
The council authorized City Manager Curt Walton to spend up to $400,000 to secure the temporary use of county Information Technology Services employees whose positions were targeted for elimination under the county’s budget, which is short some $71 million and pink slips upwards of 300 county employees.
That $400,000 might sound like enough money to save more than handful of jobs, but it’ll only salvage three full-time ones and provide for some part-time hours purchased, so to speak, in a parcel.
Chuck Robinson, with the city’s Business Support Services division, said the arrangement isn’t unusual, in that the city and county often contract positions from each other when the need arises. The timing, in this particular case, just happens to spare some county workers from the budget ax.
“Because [the county] was going to cut them, what they needed was to be able to fund the positions and we needed the service,” Robinson said.
Even with the city paying a contract rate that is fully loaded for salary and benefits, it’s still getting a deal that will save Charlotte about $250,000 in costs, Robinson said.
The county staff rate for one of the part-time IT positions, for example, is about $71 per hour, compared to the IT contractor’s rate that ranges from $65 to $156 per hour, Robinson said. The city will be using some of those part-time hours from a county employee to fill a position of interim project manager for nebulously titled enterprise resource planning, until a permanent project manager is hired.
One of the full-time positions, to assist the city in developing and managing IT infrastructure, also carries a county staff rate of $71 per hour, compared to the IT contractor’s rate of $65 to $156 per hour, Robinson said. Two of the full-time positions, working with Geographic Information Systems database design and setup services, clock in at a county staff rate of about $46 per hour, compared to the IT contractor’s rate of about $79 per hour, Robinson said.
The new “city” employees will actually remain county employees, Robinson said, with the city paying the county for their services.
Now, if the city only needed some librarians or schoolteachers.
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