Does Mahoning County need another government study?

At first glance, a job/wage schedule for Mahoning County government makes perfect sense, seeing as how there are 1,900 employees under more than 900 job codes -- a situation Commissioner Anthony Traficanti correctly terms "insane."
The goal is to end inequities and to implement an equal-pay-for-equal-work policy.
"This should have been done a long time ago," Traficanti, chairman of the board of commissioners, contends. He's right, of course, but we wonder whether another study is really necessary. Why?
Because on the shelves in the Mahoning County administration building are two significant, important, in-depth analyses of county government, one performed by the private firm of Peat Marwick, and the other by the state auditor's office.
At this point, we acknowledge that our reference to the two studies was prompted by an e-mail from a long-time reader of The Vindicator.
"I cannot believe that Anthony Traficanti is calling for another personnel report when they paid $250,000 for the last one and did nothing with it," he wrote. "The State Auditor released the results of his $250,000 Performance Study of Mahoning County in January 2002. Governments should be banned from any new study on which they have already done one. The report ... was 564 pages long and almost 200 pages were devoted to the pay and nothing was ever done with that report."
It should be noted that Traficanti was not in office when the audit was performed.
Major savings
In the report, then state Auditor Jim Petro suggested that if all 210 recommendations were implemented, the county would save $2.7 million a year. But Petro, now attorney general running for the Republican nomination for governor, also conceded that with some 1,200 full-time employees being represented by 18 collective bargaining agreements, about $1.2 million of those savings would have to be negotiated into union contracts.
We enthusiastically embraced the report, just as we did the Peat Marwick study, and, therefore, pose this question to commissioners Traficanti, David Ludt and John McNally: How many recommendations have been adopted?
The state performance audit recommended, for example, that all offices use the county's centralized personnel department and that a job classification plan be developed that would apply to all county government employees. Has this been done?
There should be uniformity in pay for employees in different offices who perform the same duties. We have long argued that such uniformity is essential for morale and that the pay schedule should apply to all administrative offices and the courts.
If the review of the two studies by the commissioners fails to provide the type of information they need to develop greater structure in county employees' job responsibilities and wage parameters, then the hiring of a company that specializes in such tasks would be justified.
Last week, Traficanti and McNally met with an official of The Archer Co. of Westerville to discuss the pay equity issue. Archer conducts surveys on pay and compensation, performance appraisal and employee satisfaction for the private and public sectors.
But before commissioners enter into an agreement with the company, they should tell the taxpayers why another study of county government is necessary and also provide a scorecard of how many recommendations made by Peat Marwick and the state auditor's office have been implemented.