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In what the Lycoming County Commissioners are calling "right-sizing" departments, 13 county employees received notices at the end of last week that their positions were being eliminated.
Stressing that the action was not a lay-off and not performance-based, speaking early Monday, the commissioners attributed the move to determining that the two departments-IT and Facilities Management-had become "bloated" with too many employees.
"It's not a layoff. It's right-sizing two departments internally as we did last year with planning," said Commissioner Marc Sortman.
"Both IT and our facilities maintenance team...I don't know how you said this nicely, they were just bloated departments that we needed to trim, but it's a permanent restructuring of the department. I wouldn't call it a layoff, and it's not firing anybody. It wasn't that anybody wasn't doing their job. It's restructuring just as we did with the planning department," he said.
In the IT department, five positions are being eliminated and in Facilities Management, eight.
Last year the Planning and Community Development department as well as several other departments at county underwent restructuring.
Commissioner Scott Metzger noted that the positions would be eliminated from the county's TDA (Table of Distribution and Allowances).
"We're right-sizing the departments. Both departments we felt were larger than what was needed, so we basically are eliminating those positions," Metzger said.
County-wide, employees were also offered an early retirement package, much like last year when the commissioners reduced the size of the county's workforce.
"For the people that were eligible for early retirement, we identified those individuals, and HR (Human Resources) sent them a letter. If they were interested, they were welcome to take it. It wasn't forced. It's voluntary, and they were welcome to take it if they chose to," Metzger said.
"There may be some people in this group...that may be eligible for early retirement, and they're welcome to also do that," Metzger added.
It was also noted by Shannon Barnes, director of operations, if there are any open positions in the county, those people may submit applications. Since the affected employees were just notified that their positions were being eliminated, it is uncertain if any of them would apply for a position in another department or seek early retirement.
County employees who received offers of early retirement over a week ago, have until before Thanksgiving weekend to notify the commissioners if they will accept the offer. The commissioners indicated that no one has notified them as yet.
The 2027 preliminary budget will be released at next Thursday's commissioners' weekly meeting, but the decision to eliminate the 13 positions is not directly related to that, according to Metzger.
"We have been discussing this for some time, but we felt these two departments needed to be right sized," he said.
Sortman explained that they have been evaluating those departments for several years.
"We started looking at these two departments two years ago, and just needed to really hone in a little bit, and it took a little time of Shannon coming in to really evaluate most, or maybe she'll interrupt me and say all. But most of those jobs are all duplicate jobs that were within that department, within those two departments that we are reducing," Sortman said.
He pointed out that the Facilities Maintenance department had been built up by six additional people for construction purposes, but currently the county has no construction projects except the Jersey Shore District Magistrate building, which he indicated was being sub-contracted.
"We had increased those six positions probably about four or five years ago...and it was for construction projects. And some of those projects have been completed. And like Commissioner Sortman said, the only big one right now that's left is the District Justice Building Dieters' Building," Metzger said.
"So at this point, we felt that it was the time to make these adjustments. Again, it wasn't based on performance. They're all good employees. It's a difficult part of the job when you have to look at stuff and say, listen, are we doing redundancy? And can we eliminate some of that," Metzger said.
Commissioner Mark Mussina, joined his colleagues in reiterating that the decision was not based on these 13 employees' performances.
"Everyone knows there's government waste, and we're trying to address where we think that is. Sometimes it's in overspending, and sometimes it's just in departments that have grown oversized throughout the years-really none of these were performance related," Mussina said.
"It's just that some of the departments were bigger than they needed to be, and that the taxpayers didn't need to pay for more employees than were necessary," Mussina added.