Cop ranks to shrink Sunday

The city’s Operations Department and Packard Music Hall will be hit hard with layoffs, too.

By Ed Runyan

WARREN — Two narcotics officers and a detective in the Warren Police Department will be reassigned to the afternoon shift Sunday, while the city’s operations department will lose nine of its 33 workers, and the Packard Music Hall will drop from four workers to two.

Those are some of the effects of the most recent layoffs Human Resources Director Gary Cicero announced this week.

Capt. Janice Gilmore, commanding officer of the police department while Acting Chief Tim Bowers is on vacation, said layoffs essentially shut down the narcotics division except for its commander, Lt. Tom Skoczylas.

But because Skoczylas will not have any narcotics officers to supervise, he will spend part of his time assisting the detective bureau, which will be reduced to two detectives and two supervisors with the reassignment of Detective Jeff Hoolihan to road patrol, Gilmore said.

“You are going to get a [patrol] car for service, but we will not be able to do the kind of proactive things we were doing before,” she said.

Gilmore noted that she hopes the loss of the narcotics division and the other changes are temporary and that federal stimulus money will be provided sometime this year to restore staffing levels.

The layoffs taking effect this Sunday, originally described as a reduction of five officers but now said to be four, takes away three patrolmen working the afternoon shift and narcotics officer Nick Carney.

The three patrolmen are Brian Martinek, John Greaver and Jason McCollum. The four officers have between seven and eight years of service with the department.

At the operations department, which maintains the city’s parks, buildings, vehicles and roads, nine fewer workers will mean that tasks will be completed slower, Dave Mazzochi, operations superintendent, said.

Instead of certain workers assigned to specific tasks, each employee will rotate to various tasks, he noted.

Mazzochi said he is already wondering what the reductions will mean for winter tasks such as removing snow and ice from roads.

At Packard Music Hall, which loses two employees in the latest round of layoffs, music hall manager Chris Stephenson said the loss of the box office manager and technical coordinator will mean the music hall will be able to do little more than open its doors this summer while its $2.2 million renovation project is taking place.

The project, paid for with federal and state grant money, involves improvements to the hall’s rigging, sound and lighting systems and replacement of the stage floor.

Stephenson said he hopes his staffing is restored by this fall, or it will be nearly impossible to operate the hall safely during one of its busier times of the year.

The city reached a tentative agreement with firefighters Wednesday that will prevent the city from laying off 18 more firefighters July 3 if the agreement is ratified by the rank and file.

All six of the city’s unions also tentatively agreed Wednesday to begin paying a portion of their health care premiums for the first time.

The concessions were sought by the city to eliminate a $1.5 million budget deficit Auditor David Griffing identified in March.

runyan@vindy.com