Patriot Bremerton
Kitty Kans Art made from cat food cans Page 8
FRIDAY, APRIL 4, 2014 | Vol. 17, No. 8 WWW.BREMERTONPATRIOT.COM | 50¢
Boys and Girls Club gym use is limited City workers’
timekeeping system is spotty
BY KEVAN MOORE
KMOORE@SOUNDPUBLISHING.COM
Kids at Bremerton’s brand new $4.5 million Boys & Girls Club have found themselves without daily gym space ever since the auxiliary gymnasium at the old East High School was closed due to roof damage shortly after the club opened. The larger gym is used by a host of other youth groups and club members have had only sporadic access to that space. Youth Wellness Campus Executive Direc tor Patr icia Hennessy said this week that she is working with the Bremerton School District, the Boys & Girls Club and other stakeholders to find a solution. She says her organization’s top priority is raising about $500,000 to re-roof the entire 40,000-square-foot
Only half of city employees use electronic system BY KEVAN MOORE KMOORE@SOUNDPUBLISHING.COM
Kevan Moore/staff photo
Bremerton Boys & Girls Club members have limited access to the old East High gym on the Youth Wellness Campus because other youth groups already use the space. structure, covering both the auxiliary and larger gyms. The Youth Wellness Campus signed a lease with the school district
in February effectively making the organization the landlord of the entire seven-acre project area. That lease supersedes a lease that the Boys &
Girls Club had in place guaranteeing them use of the auxiliary gym, not to mention the storm damage that made the smallSEE GYM, A13
She wants to mend a mother’s broken heart BY LESLIE KELLY LKELLY@SOUNDPUBLISHING.COM
Kellie Terrebonne is a matchmaker of a different kind. Her work isn’t about pairing up couples wanting to find love. Instead, her work is about reuniting people with their most treasured lost things. And that’s how she happened on to Donna Huntwork. “I have this habit,” Terrebonne said. “I like to help people.” That’s why she reads the “Lost and Found” ads in newspapers and on Craigslist. She finds happiness in matching up people who have lost things with people who have found things. It was an ad on Craigslist that caught her attention about a month ago. “It said something about looking for a lost
Leslie Kelly/staff photo
Kellie Terrebonne is searching Dyes Inlet for a lost rock. moonstone rock shaped like a heart,” Terrebonne said. “So I emailed the person and that’s when I found out the whole story.” The rock belonged to Donna Huntwork’s son John. John’s body was recovered last August in Dyes Inlet near Tracyton. He went missing on July
27, 2013, and his family and friends think he accidentally drowned. John liked to walk the beach in the area off Elizabeth Avenue, near his home in Bremerton. One theory is that John was caught in an undertow causing his death. His mother said John had a heart-shaped rock
he’d always carry with him. Because his body was recovered without his pants, she put the ad on Craigslist hoping that his black pants will wash ashore and inside them, in the pocket, will be the moonstone rock which he loved so much. “I know it’s a real long shot,” Donna said. “But I wanted to try.” She thinks John kicked off his pants and shoes, trying to stay above the current before he drowned. She thinks the rock will most likely be in his pant’s pocket. She put out the call, hoping that beachcombers who are out at low tides will keep an eye out. After hearing the story of the rock, Terrebonne said she had to go searching for it herself. She began charting low tides SEE TERREBONNE, A13
Only about half of the City of Bremerton’s employees are using an electronic timekeeping system first introduced six years ago. That’s one of several findings released in a new report by Bremerton Auditor Gary Nystul. Some of his other findings show that various city departments use over 25 different paper forms to process pay; there are some supervisors who are approving their own attendance; and the only person who prepares the entire city payroll does not have a fully trained backup. “For the March 15, 2013 payroll, 161 employees were using electronic time keeping and 158 were still manual,” Nystul wrote in his report. “The major departments not yet on electronic time keeping are police, fire and parks.” The city has just over 308 employees with salaries and wages that, not including benefits, total some $24,996,428. That’s down from 2009 when there were just over 369 employees at a cost of $26,528,877. “The city does not have a written or electronic payroll manual or compilation of standard written instructions available for guiding departments and employees in the preparation and processing of pay,” Nystul wrote.
“Employees who maintain the payroll in the various departments change from time to time. Email directives and information are issued periodically by HR and Finance but are not retained in any document or electronic file accessible to the various departments.” In addition, employees are mailed an earnings statement every two weeks and there are six city employees who still receive paper checks for payment. During last week’s study session, council member Eric Younger wondered why the statements can’t be emailed and why there were some workers still cashing paper checks. “So, we have six holdouts here who want a paper check and we cannot mandate that?” Younger asked. The answer was that all new employees are required to sign up for direct deposit and the “holdouts” are protected by prior bargaining agreements. Nystul’s report says that some departments use paper daily labor report forms to capture the individual employee’s daily activity. In some departments, the hours are then entered manually into an excel payroll worksheet which is printed, approved with a manual signature and then delivered to the payroll specialist. The payroll specialist must reenter the data into the payroll system. In other departments the hours are entered by the department timekeeper from the paper forms into the SEE TIMEKEEPING, A13