Touart Transfer Plan Calls For Sheriff To Give Up 40 Percent Of His Administrative Staff…or does it? (update)

By Jesse Farthing

Most difficult tasks have checklists. That’s the way all parties can make sure deadlines are met in an orderly fashion. That’s not how Escambia County government works.

At today’s Escambia County Jail Transfer Workshop, Interim County Administrator George Touart made it clear that he wants Sheriff David Morgan to give up 40 percent of his administrative staff to him———creating yet another wrinkle in the Board of County Commissioners’ takeover of the county jail.

However, he has backed off somewhat from that initial stance saying that he doesn’t have a set percentage in mind, according to Touart in a phone conversation this afternoon. “I fought my staff on that point (40 percent) because the sheriff has people doing work for both areas.”

However, he believes that some administrative positions need to come with the jail transfer.

Touart is under the gun to take control of the jail by October 1 and also meet the demands of the recent Department of Justice report on the facility. In June, Touart assured the board that no more than $2.6 million in non-budgeted funds would be needed; anything above that would be “internal” costs within the current departmental budgets.

“It’s not money that I have to go out and find,” he said, “It’s money that’s already budgeted that I’m going to be moving around.”

He didn’t tell the commissioners that he wanted the county commission to take any additional funds required for the transfer out of the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office budget.

Chief Deputy Eric Haines honed in on the 40 percent figure and expressed, repeatedly, during today’s meeting that the sheriff’s office can’t simply transfer 40 percent of their staff over to the county because many positions, such as risk management, attorneys and IT administrators and technicians, have shared responsibilities for both the jail and the sheriff’s office.

Touart persisted.

“It would have been a whole lot simpler for this whole transition, that none of us saw coming, if in fact the jail had their own IT people, their own HR people, their own personnel,” Touart said. “For whatever reason, you all chose to put everybody on the sheriff’s side of the fence.”

According to the interim administrator, however many people the county will need to run the jail should have been in the sheriff’s budget already and so it should not be a difficult negotiation.

In this afternoon’s phone call, Touart said that some of the sheriff’s office overhead should have been charged to the jail all along. “That really would have made this much easier,” he told the IN.

At the workshop, Haines pointed out that when the sheriff’s office took over the jail in 1995 they were given only the people already in the jail and no extra money was added to the budget.

He said that the employees under their budget are working their positions for both the jail and the sheriff’s department. The sheriff’s department only has one risk manager, two attorneys in the legal department and a single IT team handling operations for both entities. His agency will still need those positions after the county assumes control of the jail.

“We are consolidated,” Haines said. “Deconsolidation is going to cost money and cause extra positions to be created.”

When Haines expressed concern over where that money is going to come from, Touart said the funding for those positions should come out of the sheriff’s budget

“The jail is 40 percent of the total sheriff’s budget,” Touart said. “There’s no other way of looking at that. So 40 percent of those people that are on the sheriff’s side had to do something at the jail.”

The county administrator continued to hound his point. He refused to understand how, if the sheriff’s department was losing 40 percent of its responsibility, it still needed the same amount of people. Touart said that he is leaning toward taking money from the sheriff’s budget for positions at the jail.

The argument between Touart and Haines about the budget and duplication of positions went back and forth for some time with no resolution. A meeting was scheduled for next Tuesday to specifically discuss the personnel issues.

Other items discussed this morning included a briefing on the insurance for employees and inmates———that the county assured will be in place by October 1———and 28 items of IT concerns including software license transfers and inmate medical records.

The next Jail Transfer Workshop will be held at 10 a.m. on Monday, August 12.