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Commissioners remain at odds over new prison hire

Each of the three Lycoming County commissioners has a different take on a personnel issue that generated much discussion last week — the hiring of a new maintenance person in the prison.

The action was delayed to this week, and Commissioner Rick Mirabito again presented his idea Tuesday of transferring a work foreman with maintenance experience from the Pre-Release Center into the prison position.

The person offered the prison position instead could take one of three openings with the county’s maintenance department, he said.

He further clarified that the maintenance department does not directly oversee maintenance within the prison and Pre-Release Center.

Mirabito’s goal is to keep the same number of county personnel by rearranging employees, rather than adding to its ranks.

“Bottom line for me is that I don’t want to hire another person for a position when it’s clear we have people who can do the work,” he said.

Commissioner Jack McKernan seemed to lean in a similar direction but with a different method in mind.

He suggested giving the potential prison maintenance person the position they were offered and instead moving an additional person from the Pre-Release Center into another opening with county maintenance.

“The end result will be the same, it’s just there’s a difference of opinion as to how to get there,” McKernan said.

However, Mirabito disagreed, stating the new person would be more open to training whereas someone coming from the center could struggle to adapt to changes in operation.

“For all sorts of reasons, I think it would be wiser to take the new person and put them in our maintenance where we have openings,” Mirabito said. “The PRC and the prison are a unit that have been under the direction and supervision of the warden.”

Although Commissioner Tony Mussare also values the idea of keeping staff numbers level, he expressed concerns about moving any personnel from the center at all.

“To eliminate one of those supervisors may be a mistake because they service our nonprofit community,” Mussare said. “We need to look at that in detail.”

To that, McKernan added that more inmates at the center are working “actual” jobs, making them unavailable to do the community service work for nonprofits, resulting in Mirabito’s belief that there isn’t enough work to justify keeping all of the foremen there.

Further, Mirabito feels, while nonprofits need and deserve support, taxpayers shouldn’t have to keep footing the bill.

“For me, to say we’re going to keep people on staff so we can send them out to a nonprofit that isn’t paying any property taxes … At a certain point, we have to have a balance,” he said.

More discussion and a decision on the matter are expected during their meeting Thursday.

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