The Worcester County Commissioners agreed last month to convert two part-time positions within the sheriff’s department after learning that recent vacancies had resulted in soaring overtime costs.
A Worcester County Sheriff’s Department vehicle is pictured.
File photo
By Bethany Hooper, Associate Editor
County leaders agreed last month to convert two part-time positions within the sheriff’s department after learning that recent vacancies had resulted in soaring overtime costs.
Sheriff Matt Crisafulli came before the Worcester County Commissioners on Aug. 20 with a request to convert two part-time positions within his department to a full-time posting. While the conversion would cost the sheriff’s office an additional $11,493, he said it was far less than the overtime costs recorded when those part-time school resource officer positions went unfilled last school year.
“By converting these two part-time positions, it will have those positions filled,” he told the commissioners, “And by that point, if granted, all of our schools will be covered. Therefore, the goal would be to dramatically cut down on the overtime.”
Crisafulli noted the sheriff’s office currently had two vacant part-time positions assigned to county schools. However, his department has no applicants to fill those vacancies.
“Also, to give you some context with the staffing challenges we faced last school year, we were responsible for filling 561 vacancies of school assignments within our schools and that caused a total of $173,554.54 in overtime that was expanded,” he explained. “Of that amount, $151,857 was reimbursed to our county through grant funding, and that left a total of $21,697.54 that came out of my FY24 budget. So we did the best we could to minimize the fiscal hit there.”
Crisafulli added that part of the vacancies reported last year were due to unanticipated medical leave among full-time staff. And while the sheriff’s office had no problems filling full-time positions, he said he did with part-time postings.
“By converting those two [positions] to full-time, it would not exceed $11,493.04,” he said. “That is our first request, to get our schools covered.”
Crisafulli said he was also seeking the commissioners’ permission to convert a detective position to a corporal position, a supervisory role that costs an additional $7,404. He said the third conversion would allow for better oversight with the Worcester County Bureau of Investigation.
“The total cost for both of these requests is $18,897.84,” he said. “We took a look at our current operating budget, and this can be absorbed within the current budget.”
While Commissioner Joe Mitrecic made a motion to approve the conversions, he requested that the sheriff come before the commissioners with such changes prior to budget adoption. When asked if the sheriff’s office still had part-time positions, Crisafulli said it did but that it was trying to convert those positions to full-time.
“We’ve converted many part-time positions to full-time because as they leave we don’t have a pool to select from,” he replied. “We have steadily been working on converting. My goal, in the long run, would be to have all part-time positions converted to full-time and hopefully still have the full-time applications coming in.”
After further discussion, the commissioners voted 7-0 to approve the conversion requests. The commissioners last week also voted to approve two new positions within the emergency services department – an assistant chief of electronic services, with a salary range of $116,000 to $154,000, and an emergency communications QA/QI specialist, with a salary range between $77,000 and $85,000.