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Thursday, February 14, 2013
The Rhinoceros Times Greensboro
County park ‘savings’ evaporate like dew by Scott D. Yost county editor
All of the Guilford County commissioners have presumably heard the time-honored advice about being penny wise and pound foolish – but now they’re getting a real world lesson in the subject. Former County Manager Brenda Jones Fox told the board in early 2012 that Guilford County would see big savings if it took over the maintenance and operation of the county’s parks – a job that, for years and years, the county had outsourced to Greensboro, Gibsonville, Burlington and Jamestown. The parks takeover was supposed to save the county about $170,000 in fiscal 2012-2013, when it went into effect halfway through the fiscal year, and then save $250,000 or more each year after that, but it’s now becoming clear to the commissioners that, if anything, running the parks in-house is going to end up costing the county more, not less. At a Thursday, Feb. 7 work session, Guilford County Budget Director Michael Halford and Property and Parks Management Director Sandy Woodard gave a presentation on the parks takeover to county commissioners. Halford told the commissioners that the county did save money, but he added quickly that those “savings” were needed for additional maintenance and repairs at the parks. Halford said the commissioners could take some money out of the parks system and use it for other budget purposes, but he said that many parks projects really needed doing. At the work session, Halford reeled off a list of recommended current and future parks projects that would take the $170,000 and more. Halford said some of the repairs were to assure public safety while others were aesthetic in nature but still badly needed. In the past, some of the parks repairs and maintenance would have been handled by the cities and towns as part of the contracts. However, now anytime the slightest thing goes wrong it’s the county’s responsibility. Halford said existing funds would not
cover all the parks needs. “Everybody has needs, but we only have limited resources,” Halford said. After the work session, Commissioner Hank Henning said everyone should have seen this coming. “I love the way government sells things to the citizens,” Henning said. “First, they tell you, ‘Oh, this will save us a lot of money.’ Then they say, ‘Well, we’re going to break even’ – and then it’s, ‘Oh, we need more money to fund this.’” With the exception of a one remaining contract with Burlington, the county is no longer paying cities and towns to operate the parks, and the county is also no longer paying out an 8 to 10 percent administrative fee for the cities and towns to manage those parks.
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Parks Management Department’s payroll and three positions to the Facilities Department’s payroll. After the meeting, Halford said he doesn’t have an estimate yet of how much it will cost Guilford County to operate the parks in the upcoming 2013-2014 budget. During the work session, Woodard said the county had saved about $18,000 by purchasing equipment to replace cityleased equipment. She also said the county had saved about $6,500 by putting out a mowing contract for all the parks to the lowest bidder. “It’s nickels and dimes, but those nickels and dimes are going to add up for us,” Woodard said at the meeting. When Halford heard the commissioners (Continued on page 34)
Scandals Ruining County Image by Scott D. Yost county editor
On Monday, Feb. 11, the Guilford County Board of Commissioners met with county staff and others to discuss ways to counteract the negative publicity the county continually gets from The Rhinoceros Times. Actually, it isn’t just negative press from The Rhino Times that has county officials ready to take action – it’s all the bad press in recent years from numerous media outlets. However, at the Feb. 11 meeting, several speakers singled out The Rhino Times as a major purveyor of negative publicity for Guilford County. County staff who have been looking into the problem said the county needs to stop taking the bad press lying down and instead make proactive moves to get its side of the story out. A Guilford County staff committee has been working behind the scenes on the county’s image problem, and, at the Feb. 11 work session, the Board of Commissioners heard suggestions on how to fix that as well as how to improve transparency in Guilford
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Of course, the county now has 30 parks employees on its payroll, has created a new high-paying parks manager position that’s yet to be filled, and there are many maintenance and operating costs looming on the horizon. Guilford County is also having to handle all the payroll, insurance, benefits and other administrative costs for what is essentially a new county parks and recreation department. When the commissioners were first presented with the idea, Fox told the board there would big savings. She said the economies of scale created by running all the parks under one roof would bring costs down significantly. At the Feb. 7 work session, Halford said Guilford County had added 27 fulltime park positions to Property and
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County government and open up direct lines of communication with the citizens. Several speakers said that, as it is now, media outlets are the only place the public gets news about Guilford County, and those stories, they said, almost always have a negative slant. Suggestions from the committee include hiring a public relations specialist, using social media more aggressively, producing YouTube videos that explain the county’s side of news stories and expanding the county’s Citizen’s Academy. They also spoke of ways to enhance the county’s image by using the internet to increase transparency in government. At the meeting, Guilford County Board of Elections Deputy Director Charlie Collicutt, who will become the county’s elections director on Friday, March 1, spoke about some of the differences between Guilford County, the state’s third largest county, and Wake and Mecklenburg counties, the state’s two largest. Collicutt said Guilford County was the only one of the three that had no public
relations manager. He said Wake and Mecklenburg counties also had other tools for communicating with citizens that Guilford County does not have. For instance, he said, Mecklenburg and Wake have more advanced television production capabilities, and they create their own shows for local television and the web. In addition, Collicutt said, Wake County promotes financial transparency with a web portal called Wake Accountability Tax Check (WATCH). That tool makes highly detailed budget information available to any citizen with internet access. That way, citizens can go on the web and see how their tax dollars are being spent. Lisa Ashley, a committee member who works in the Department of Social Services, said Guilford County could communicate more effectively with its citizens through the use of Facebook and Twitter, and by increasing its public information efforts in other ways. “Other jurisdictions have more robust public relations,” she said. (Continued on page 24)
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