Olivia Newton John sang about getting physical, but the St. Mary’s County commissioners were singing the praises of being innovative at their June 25 meeting in Leonardtown.
In their last meeting until July 16, the commissioners — Mike Hewitt (R) was not in attendance — heard two radical plans to reorganize in-house positions.
They started off by approving a request from the sheriff’s office to reorganize the booking specialist and civilian security specialist positions to the title of corrections specialist and to extend the existing career ladder to the employees holding the latter classification.
In fiscal 2025, the sheriff’s office budget includes four booking specialist positions and eight civilian security specialist positions.
The idea was floated to create a corrections specialist position combining the duties of the booking and security functions.
The combined position will increase employee skills and decrease the tedium involved in working the same post each day and having a larger pool of cross-trained employees will assist in filling open posts.
“What we’re finding is that we still have a staffing shortage so with that we have the booking specialist and if they were trained they could also fill in for when a corrections security specialist wasn’t involved,” St. Mary’s County Sheriff’s Office Warden MaryAnn Thompson said. “That would leave a corrections officer to do the security position post as a corrections officer should so we’re proposing.”
“The intention is as vacancies occur the new position is the position that will be posted so through attrition we’ll have 12 individuals to fill the position,” Director of Human Resources Catherine Pratson said. “And then there will be a pool that can fulfill either duty.”
Pratson added that all 12 positions would have the benefit of the career ladder.
“This sounds like a really good innovative solution that helps people’s jobs be more interesting to them,” Commissioner Eric Colvin (R) said.
“It also really helps with the whole entire workforce at the detention center to keep things running,” Thompson said.
Pratson added that the human resources department “fully supports the innovative solution.”
HR shuffles departmentThe county has been unable to successfully recruit and retain a benefits administrator since the July 2021 retirement of a former long-term employee.
The benefits administrator position is currently classified as a Grade 9 and requires strong analytical skills, supervisory skills and effective interpersonal skills.
A proposal suggested removing the supervisory duties, realigning these to the department’s deputy director and revising the position classification to a Grade 8.
“In the spirit of innovation we are hoping to reorganize the department of human resources for two primary purposes,” Pratson said. “One of the things we’ve found is [the position is] a very analytical position and also requires supervisory skills and is somewhat schizophrenic in the duties. We think if we can streamline that position we’ll have better luck filling it.”
“I always love innovative solutions in trying to fix a problem and the added bonus looks like there’s some salary savings by doing this,” Colvin said, referring to the more than $5,000 the move would save.
Commissioner Mike Alderson Jr. (R) asked if there there were a lack of candidates or were candidates just unwilling to take on the supervisory aspect of the job.
“When we did the last recruitment we found the candidates were really in two separate buckets,” Pratson said. “The analysts were more focused on using the data and understanding the documents and did not have the supervisory skills, and the supervisory individuals didn’t have that sort of depth of experience.”
The commissioners approved the request.
More space for healthThe commissioners approved an agreement to lease about 3,792-square-feet of office space at Unit H of 25470 Point Lookout Road in Leonardtown for the health department from W.M. Davis Development at Breton Marketplace LLC.
“They are already experiencing space issues with what they have right now,” Deputy County Attorney John Houser said.
The move is precipitated by several factors, including state changes requiring more employees to spend more time in the office, existing position vacancies that will soon be filled and additional positions that will be created following the awarding of new grants on July 1.
The lease is for about $5,000 a month and the space is next door to the actual health department.
“My understanding is the health department has the funding for at least the next two years,” Colvin said.
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