Painter: On to the topic of Human Resource services for elected officials. This is an older request for an agenda item that Tom Slockett had mentioned some time ago.

Slockett: Well something happened just last week that really underlines my concerns. A long-time Map Delineator in our office left, who was involved from the beginning with the mapping project. He just took an enormous amount of institutional information that’s in his head and walked out the door. It’s a position that we’ve been trying to upgrade for over 2 years now unsuccessfully. It’s just really sad that it came to this. In addition to that, I’ve talked about the fact that my deputies are not paid at the same level as the management being hired by the Board and the other offices in this building who they work with everyday. They are highly qualified and capable. Now that we have a Human Resources function, we need help from that area either through Pat’s office or Human Resources. One of the problems is there seems to be a certain amount of conflict between what the Board may want and what another elected official wants. The Board is hiring it’s management people at a higher level than the management people in my office. I have a feeling that may be one reason that the Human Resources people hired by the Board may not feel comfortable in helping me to raise my people to the same level, if they perceive there’s some desire or some reason that the Board is hiring people at a higher level. I don’t know if other elected officials are having that problem. I think the Sheriff and the County Attorney probably don’t because your salaries are high enough that I don’t believe you have maxed out on the percentages that you can hire your management at. Whereas the Treasurer, Auditor and Recorder, because our salaries are quite a bit lower, we are maxed out at the 80% and 75% level for our deputies. We are more constrained than others from raising their pay. It’s just not legal to do it without creating non-deputy management positions. That’s what I’m interested in doing is figuring out how to go about that and still have them be employees that are managers hired by us who answer to us and not the Board. Of course the Board would have the final decision on this in the budget process. But I would like help in preparing the job descriptions and figuring out how to do that so I could present to the Board for them to make a decision. That’s what I wanted to let people think about, and let them know that’s what I want to do and ask how I should go about it.

Jordahl: Did you say that the Human Resources Department was not cooperating or something like that?

Slockett: I don’t mean to put it in a negative way but we have been unable to figure out how to work with them to get this done. I’ll put it that way. I think one reason is I don’t think they have time. I think they are so overloaded and so understaffed.

White: One of the things that happened and frequently occurs, when the County created this new function, we spent lots of time talking about what the position and office was going to do. The volume is probably twice as much as we ever imagined it to be. Lora just struggles to meet all of the requests that she gets and all of the things that pop up. I have an e-mail from her, I don’t remember what it was that triggered it in the last week, but the end of her e-mail was if the Board asks why I’m not getting done what they want me to do, be sure and let them know that we’re still working hard. Which is absolutely true. She gets lots of little brush fires to deal with.

Slockett: That’s why I was against this new office because I felt all along that it’s a function that if you create that function it’s just way bigger than was being realized. I thought from the beginning that this was going to be a major expense to the County requiring… At the time I thought it would require 4 assistants and that’s one of the reasons I didn’t want to start it up.

White: If you build it they will come.

Jordahl: Wait a minute. Are you saying that we didn’t need the function?

Slockett: I think we got along fine for 100 years without it and we would’ve been fine to continue without it.

Jordahl: Pat?

White: I disagree.

Slockett: I know Pat disagrees.

Stutsman: I disagree.

White: I 100% disagree with that.

Stutsman: When I think of 400 employees and no HR person I’m just almost embarrassed that we went as long as we did without HR. Sometimes I think being the department is so overwhelmed at this point is partly because we didn’t tackle this when we had 200 employees.

Lehman: We’re lucky to have brush fires no instead of major…

Slockett: We had problems before and we still have problems now. We’ve had major problems since the HR function has started up in this County as well.

Jordahl: Lancing the boil.

Stutsman: Yes.

Slockett: If you check Scott County, their HR function is… It doesn’t decrease the staff because they’ve had it there and things are fixed.

White: The question that Tom raises though has policy implications both for him and the other elected officials. Probably not so much for Bob and I think you’re right on that. At least not for me, but for the Board. This is a bit of a historical note. Cletus Redlinger is the best remembered example of…

Slockett: Ed Steinbrech too.

White: That’s right. Don Krall made Cletus Chief Clerk rather than Deputy Treasurer for the sole purpose of being able to pay him more than the statutory deputy. If the elected official is willing to look at having a management person who is not a deputy and if the Board is willing to consider that policy or approach it is doable to creating a system that pays a chief clerk or some other management position. It truly is management to be involved in hiring and firing and discipline. That is a way to avoid the statutory ceiling for deputy pay. A better way would be to raise the pay for the Auditor, Treasurer, Recorder, and Sheriff closer to where it ought to be rather than where it currently is so that those deputy salaries go up as well.

Jordahl: Have you spoken with the Compensation Board members about that?

White: Yes I have over time.

Jordahl: If you have a position description even in your mind.

Slockett: Well they already exist for the deputies. They just need to be changed to another designation and I need to figure out how to go about it. Before we had the HR function I would’ve known how to do that. Now I need to work with HR and I need to have time either Pat’s office or HR to figure out how to do it.

Painter: So just to clarify without going into any detail you don’t want to go into has there been an attempt on your part to work with HR yet on this? Or is it just kind of a sense that they’re not going to have time for you somehow.

Slockett: Yes because of our working for 2 years to upgrade the other positions and so forth. I just don’t believe that it was impossible to do that. I think it was just they didn’t have time to deal with it. They were dealing with too many other things.

White: But the person who left, left a collective bargaining position.

Slockett: That’s right.

Stutsman: So you’re trying to make another deputy position?

White: You don’t have any other place you could’ve promoted to or held out as an advancement option.

Slockett: Correct.

Jordahl: So that departure can’t be attributed to the Board’s staff being uncooperative because of our desire to hire somebody else.

Slockett: No we’ve been working with HR in trying to get this done for a couple of years.

White: Would you be talking about trading in a deputy or gaining a new position?

Slockett: No this is the map delineators. It’s a new function working with AutoCAD and computer mapping. It’s highly competitive in the marketplace and it’s in demand. It’s just not paid enough. It’s paid below our account clerk II’s that they work with in the office. When the Board created a position for Zoning who does the same thing only not nearly as sophisticated they pay that person more than our Map Delineators. It just seems clear that there was ample evidence that it needed to be upgraded.

Stutsman: Are you talking about the GIS coordinator?

Slockett: No. I’m talking about the Map Delineators in our office.

Stutsman: In planning and Zoning.

Jordahl: When the Board created a position in planning and Zoning, what position are you talking about?

Slockett: Jeff.

Jordahl: That wasn’t this Board.

Stutsman: Jeff doesn’t make…

Slockett: Yes, that’s what he does. He started working entirely on AutoCAD. Now he’s half time building inspector too.

Peters: He does permits.

Slockett: Yes.

Stutsman: But he doesn’t make very good money.

Jordahl: He antedates me.

White: Is he not a collective bargaining position?

Slockett: He is yes.

White: What level or description?

Slockett: I don’t know. I really don’t know the specifics, I just know that Mark and Chris Kahle have been, at my instruction, trying to work with Lora to get these positions upgraded. Mark has been working on it for 2 years and Chris has been working on it since he got here and we just have had a dead end.

Jordahl: Isn’t that function more one of the union than it is of the Board of Supervisors. When you have a position created within the union don’t you have a matter of dealing with them?

Slockett: Well you do but when management wants to upgrade a position it’s not the unions job to do it for us. It’s our job to do it. That was the problem in getting that position upgraded. There are many people at the same labor grade in other offices that aren’t doing computer mapping and things that are really well paid in the marketplace. They didn’t wish to allow this to happen unless they got their wages raised too. I think that’s why Lora wasn’t able to do that. In terms of creating a new position and putting these people in it, it just seems like they’re upgrading it to the level, in Zoning, of the person who does mapping there. Seem to me there good have been some way to get from here to there. We still really want to do that. I guess I’ve confused people. We want to upgrade some of our collective bargaining positions but also I want to upgrade my management position because in both instances they have peers working at the same level or maybe not as difficult a level who are being paid more in the same building. There’s recognition that the Board understands that when they hire people they need to pay them more for doing that level of work. But if one of our elected offices fills that position, there’s no ability to recognize that. There are legal differences and technical differences, bureaucratic differences, but when you’re the person and you’re feeding your kids and taking them to school and everything, it’s hard for you to understand. It’s very disconcerting and hard on morale for those people to deal with this. It’s seen as being unfair. It’s not so much the money, although the money would help. It’s more just the unfairness of the situation on a day to day, week to week basis.

Jordahl: I want to address this unfairness. When things are unfair in the County that’s exactly the thing that politics exists to rectify. Let’s make it fair. That’s the whole idea of this country, right? But it’s not fair, I think, to point a finger at Lora and say that HR’s not cooperating with us if the issue is creating a new position, or getting somebody out of the union. Maybe that’s the issue. It seems like you’ve pointed a finger at Lora and the issue is something else.

Slockett: I don’t think I was pointing the finger at Lora. I’m asking for HR services…

Jordahl: The record would show.

Slockett: …to get this done. I don’t think it will. We have been working with her and we’ve been unable to get it done. I believe what I said is, we were unable to figure out how to get it done with her.

Jordahl: You said that in addition. My question is what is the issue that you are actually trying to address here and how can we fix it?

Slockett: I would like to be able to upgrade positions that need to be upgraded, and I would like to be able to upgrade both people in the bargain unit and people not in the bargain unit. Just to the same level as the other people they work with every day.

Stutsman: When the Board did this whole salary survey thing… I think it was to have a very equitable and fair way of determining salaries, positions and wages across the board. We didn’t want to get into the situation, at least I didn’t want to get into the situation of saying gee, I need a pay raise. I’m not making as much money as the person at the City, and then coming to the Board and saying, OK, we’ll give that guy a pay raise. Then, what about the next person that comes in. Then pretty soon it was just chaos. There wasn’t any set system on how we’re going to do that. It sounds to me, Tom, like you’re almost wanting to go out of that system again.

Slockett: No, Sally, that’s the whole point. Don’t you recall how strongly I argued to include my deputies in that salary survey, and you agreed to it, and there, it’s in the minutes that you agreed to it, and then it just didn’t happen. You didn’t do it for our positions, and that’s the whole problem. If they would have been included, they would have been raised to the same level as the other people. Since the Board made that decision, it’s necessary for you to face up to the consequences of it, because it’s resulting in leaving part of the employees that are under you and the other elected officials out of that system. That’s the whole point.

Jordahl: That actually wasn’t directly what the Board addressed in exempting elected officials from the salary survey. It was sort of a deference to the Compensation Board. I was arguing on the side of including the elected officials in the salary survey. I think it’s unfortunate that the point wasn’t stressed more at the time of doing that salary survey, that the impact would be primarily in the point of the deputies in departments with the elected officials.

Slockett: I also brought it up to the Compensation Board, asking them to recognize that and take it into account in the decisions that they made, but just nothing ever happens. We’ve actually got people leaving now. I can tell you that the people in my office feel that they’re not being treated fairly.

Jordahl: Well, the Board is, I think, very aware of this problem, particularly in anything related to computers.

Slockett: They’re having the same problem in the computers.

Jordahl: Well, of course. Information Services is having a particular difficulty with this. We are not blind to that. In fact, we have some good information on how salaries are running in this field locally in Iowa. We’re trying to take this into account generally. It’s very timely that your concern about how do we fix this comes forward right now. I’m not sure exactly what we’re going to do about that.

Stutsman: No, I don’t know either.

Jordahl: It is the kind of thing that it’s right to raise and that we can sit down and pow wow about and figure that out for this next budget go round, maybe.

Lehman: Jean Schultz shared some information with Board members of what it costs to recruit and train. If you lose somebody you start the process back up. It’s expensive.

Jordahl: Jean did a good report.

Lehman: Pretty substantial dollar amount.

Duffy: I’d like to say something here. Looking back and being the senior on this Board of Supervisors, and now we’re talking about GIS. That’s a sophisticated mapping project, that’s what it is, and it’s expensive. But I can remember we used to pack this room with elected officials, city councils. I know, Tom, that you said that your department could handle it, especially Mark down there on the mapping, to upgrade the mapping like we have it now. I know if you were off something like a tenth of an inch across 40 acres it could be, I don’t know exactly how many, but you could really mess a thing up. We had several meetings. I think Pat was here, I know that. It was suggested that we get a firm out of Illinois to do it. One, I think, was maybe from Montana.

Slockett: One was from Missouri, I believe. Illinois, some various places.

Duffy: If we’d have done that, it would have cost us thousands and thousands of dollars more and indeed, the people in your office, especially Mark, and we’ve used up ever since. But again, getting back to this Jail, that always was my top priority. I don’t think we need a lot of other things here just yet, nor do I think we need GIS this go-round. If we do the whole thing and ask for more dollars, it’s one more fly in the ointment, it’s going to get shot down. But our Sheriff is up against it, and the State says your jail’s too full, you ought to do something, we just have to do it and it’s up to the public. I know I left out a lot of things. I know I was, for one, really appreciated, and other Supervisors that indeed the Auditor’s department, and again, especially Mark did that. That was sophisticated. I used to go down and watch him. I told everybody I’d give him instructions. But indeed you did it.

Painter: OK, the next item is fees assessed for records access, business purposes versus individual use. This item sprang from a brief conversation I’d had with Tom Slockett, in which I talked about our providing all of our real estate recordings on zip disks, and assessing a fee of $200 a month for any corporate or individual person who wanted to obtain those records. I believe there was some conversation about whether it was allowable to charge that kind of… It seemed like a lot of money to charge, and I set that fee because Linn County and Polk County are charging, basically, the same thing. I have since done some math on that, and it comes out to less than 6 cents an image, so I’m guessing that we’re probably OK either way you define the Code. But I also felt that there was some leeway in there for charging on a different basis for a business rather than an individual. I did not pre-prepare Pat for any of this today, so we may not be able to really fully discuss that. I visited briefly about it with you via some e-mail at the time because I had an inquiry from a corporate client who wanted to be charged. I think they decreed that they would be willing to pay us $20 per disk.

Stutsman: What are you thinking of charging?

Painter: We’ve got a flat fee of $200 a month.

Stutsman: Oh, I see.

Painter: They provide the disks. So we’ve agreed to that.

Slockett: I always thought Pat said in the past, and things may have changed, I know that it changed for mapping and GIS because the legislature passed special legislation allowing us to recoup more than the cost of reproduction. It was always my understanding that when we produced public records that we could only charge the cost of producing them and no more. If we had so, if it required special programming of the computer or staff time to produce them or something like that, we could charge that. We weren’t able to make a profit or charge more than the actual cost of reproduction. I think that’s why I thought it would be a good idea to discuss. Maybe there’s other fees we could raise, too, that we haven’t thought about.

Painter: This is actually, this cost is a decrease for these particular clients. They were paying more when they were per page to photocopy. They’re quite pleased with the development.

Duffy: What was the cost again, the decrease of the cost?

Painter: Well, it was 25 cents a page, and during our heavy months they were paying, some companies were paying $800 a month.

Duffy: Is that right?

Lehman: Is that going to reflect on your income for your budget, then?

Painter: It’ll reflect some.

Jordahl: During the current fiscal year. So, $800, what would be the drop in monthly revenues that you anticipate?

Painter: My guess is that we’re probably not going to see very much of a drop in revenues because of increases in other areas. This is an area where I think we were flirting with disaster in charging 25 cents a page to make the photocopy anyway, given that law and the way that it reads, because it certainly wasn’t costing us 25 cents per live photocopy, so I feel pretty good about that. Anyway, I just wanted to raise this. I don’t know if Pat has any input at this point, or would like to do, or thinks it’s worth doing any research on this, as more offices may be on the cusp of providing different kinds of services, or as we consider, what could we provide to the public or what could we provide to corporations that they may want…

White: What is it that led you to think there might be some ability to distinguish businesses from citizens?

Painter: It’s a chapter of the Code that talks about individual use versus… This is what I had sent you an email about. It’s purpose, actually. There are 2 separate purposes listed. If access to the data processing software is provided to a person solely for the purpose of accessing a public record, the amount shall not be more than that required to recover direct publication costs. Then later on, it says if access is provided to a person for a purpose other than simply accessing a public record, and these people all want this, not just to access a public record. They take this information and it goes back to their businesses, and they input it into their own software system.

Stutsman: So they’re using it for financial gain.

Painter: Correct.

Jordahl: We’re doing their work for them.

Painter: Kind of.

Jordahl: It abuts the question of privacy and all that, too. If somebody wants information, and it’s public information, do we have to provide it for them in that form? Price might serve as a disincentive to accumulate documents, or we ought to develop policies, or both.

Painter: But anyway, Tom raised a question, I thought, well, we’ll throw it up here for some conversation and we can talk more about it later, perhaps, or think about it a little more. I just went with that particular fee because that’s what Linn and Polk County…

White: I was aware that you were using that fee. I think that’s fine, partly because we found other people using that fee, partly because you can articulate a reasonable basis for the fee.

Painter: OK.

Kriz: I think you have other departments. Jerry Musser has looked at trying to disseminate his information out to the realtors and the banks and save them in the office and their copying costs in the same manner in what you’re doing.

Carpenter: I think it was approved by the Board to charge .50 a copy.

White: You can include staff time in the cost of your copies. Some of you have been invited to a meeting in the next couple of weeks to talk about records access.

Painter: OK. Anything else from anyone else?

Grimm: Last year at this time I tried to gain access to state my peace. I don’t know how it got stopped, but you just can’t walk in and ask a public official to walk out. They’re elected by the populace. When you have a personal problem divorce is legally a 60 to 90 day arbitration period. And you ask the attorney to rework the property deeds lost. Excessive divorcing is ruining this country. Probably 5,000 children in the last 10 years have not seen their parents in this county. I would like to really figure it out a little bit closer. But that ruins the strength of the military pool in the United States. That’s about as far as I’ll go on that. The only thing is most of my work has got a little paper, sometimes it’s a little hazy. All requests are on paper, nothing verbal. When somebody promises me something I expect to get it done. Going back to the bad situation. It’s not your problem really but I woke up during surgery in ’76. I didn’t actually realize what was happening. I was still groggy. They didn’t have me taped to the table or strapped. Optic surgery.

Painter: Sir excuse me. I’m very sorry for the difficulties that you’ve had in this surgery.

Grimm: But it relates.

Painter: But we need to finish this meeting.

Grimm: Can I have the floor for a little while?

Painter: Just a minute or 2.

Grimm: People know about it. I have asked Mr. White to file murder charges and it is not being accomplished. I want to thank you very much. Time will prove what happened.

Painter: Thank you. Anything else?

Stutsman: Next meeting?

Painter: We would typically be looking at October. The 16th to the 27th I’m going to be having something akin to a vacation.

Stutsman: Good for you. Where are you going?

Painter: We haven’t decided yet. Do we ever historically leap into the first or second week of a month or do we prefer to go into the next month?

Jordahl: Once we’re in November we’re moving up against the budget.

Painter: That’s true. How about the week of the 9th or the week of the 2nd.

Jordahl: Better to go earlier in October than it is to try and deal with November I think.

Painter: We’ve got the 3rd and the 10th then.

Jordahl: OK.

Lehman: How about the 10th.

Kriz: I would prefer the 10th because we’re still hot and heavy in tax season on the 3rd of October.

Painter: Lets just shoot for October 10th at 1:30. I thank you for your input and participation and endless patience today. We are adjourned.

Adjourned at 3:25 p.m.

Attest: Tom Slockett, Auditor

By: Casie Parkins, Recording Secretary