Harford County Director of Human Resources Scott Gibson has spent the past few days notifying 34 administration employees that they would be let go. The action was the Craig Administration’s response to a round of budget cuts enacted by the Harford County Council to support a cut to the real estate tax rate. The tax cut is estimated to be worth about $54 on a $300,000 home.
The Dagger has been provided with a list of departments and positions where employees were either laid off or terminated, as indicated by the column headings on the chart below. The column marked “other” provides supplemental information which identifies vacancies that have been frozen and also notes transfers of so-called classified employees. According to Gibson, classified employees are required by the terms of their contract to be given preference over non-standard, temporary employees. So classified employees were sometimes transferred rather than laid off, filling positions left vacant by temporary employees who were terminated.
Among the hardest hit on the list seems to be the Information Systems Department, which lost 2 Deputy Chiefs of Information Systems and several other professional positions. Gibson said the cuts were absorbed by the department in order to maintain staffing at the Emergency Operations 911 Call Center.
The lost positions will be considered frozen or terminated according to Gibson, who also said that some departments such as Housing or Inspections would likely add back positions at some point, depending on future building activity. According to the Harford County Code, qualified employees on layoff status are given the option to return to work before new employees can be hired.
The cuts take effect 30 working days from the date of employee notification, or in this case, sometime during the first week of August.
Here’s the list:
All lower end jobs basically. How about starting at the top for a change?
Notice how there was one non standard part time temporary position cut under Office of the County Executive? Was this Mr. Carlin’s position? I’m sure most part time non standard temps would like to be making over $77,000 a year. Now maybe Craig will get rid of some of his aides, chiefs of staff, spokespersons, assistants or whatever he chooses to call them. He only has 5 now since Mr. Carlin’s demise.
Looks like Parks and Rec sinched the belts (9 trail monitors…really). Property Taxes definitely need to be reduced in Harford County; we can’t spend what we don’t have and then look to unproportional real estate taxes to balance the books.