North Plainfield Municipal Cost Cutting (where’s the beef?)
Published on 13 Mar 2010 at 9:43 am.
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Filed under Local.
By Frank D’Amore
As the result of the Borough of North Plainfield cutting costs, some part time employees have been terminated.I am sure after much deliberation it was decided these cuts are necessary. One has to ask, are our elected officials sincere about cost cutting, or is this just window dressing?. I tend to believe the latter.
We have borough employees that are permitted to take vehicles, owned by the municipality, home. This practice of giving employees a taxpayer supported perk should be stopped immediately. For more than a year, citizens at council meetings have been telling the mayor and council that we cannot afford this unnecessary perk. It would be more cost effective to pay these employees the established cost per mile for using their own vehicle, when called out for an emergency. Responding to an emergency is the reason for this perk, but there is no clear definition of what the borough considers an emergency. Much better records need to be kept with regard to the number of times these employees are called out for an emergency. When I inquired about the number of times these employees were called out in one year, I received the following answer, “in response to your OPRA request, no records exist specific to your request. This tells me that we are not too concerned about how our tax dollars are being spent. Perhaps it is time to conduct an audit that will reveal the cost of this perk to the taxpayers.
Terminating employees, while perpetuating the wasteful and expensive practice of permitting employees to take vehicles home, appears to be the epitome of hypocrisy.
North Plainfield needs to get creative in cutting expenses. I believe if a time and motion study were conducted in the borough, it would show that transfers from days to nights of some managerial level employees could free up those that do the meaningful work, thus cutting down on overtime in areas that require minimum manpower. I also believe it could be found that consolidation of positions could show an economic & productive benefit. Having at least one municipal court session per week during the daytime business hours would significantly reduce the amount of overtime paid to the employees involved.
Citizens should not inconvenienced when going to borough hall and finding the department, in which they are seeking help, closed because the employee/s are on a break. Or worse yet, not finding themselves standing by one of the counters listening to the employee engaged in an extended personal phone call.
What makes things more troubling is that those on the administrative level permit these things to happen openly and repeatedly.
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