County eyes maintenance costs

Now that “spring has sprung,” officials are taking a closer look at all of the mowing, weeding and other grounds maintenance that fill up Madison County employees’ time.

There’s about 30 different pieces of property that require some type of upkeep by the county – from mowing to weeding to cleaning to building maintenance, according to a chart provided to the board of supervisors by Madison County Administrator Lisa Robertson.

In recent years, county officials have cut back on the amount of mowing and landscaping work they have contracted out, relying more heavily on “in house” employees, County Administrator Lisa Robertson said at the board’s April 30 workshop meeting.

However, the amount of maintenance work needed on all of these properties exceeds the number of man-hours available with the county’s current maintenance staff, Robertson told the board.

This has led county officials to juggle some of its employees around to cover all of the responsibilities – including using transfer station staff and cleaning employees to do basic maintenance work, like watering and litter pick-up, she said.

(The county also typically hires a couple seasonal summertime employees, who typically work about 25 hours a week for three months, to mow grass, Facilities and Maintenance Director Ross Shifflett said at the meeting.)

Although Robertson said the county has no “major” mowing contracts, she added that sometimes it may be cheaper to pay a contractor to mow some of the county’s properties, rather than have a county employee use multiple hours of his or her time to complete the job.

Supervisors Vice Chairman James Arrington asked that he be informed before the county pursues any contracts of this type. About two years ago, some members of the public approached Arrington upset that the county was hiring multiple companies to perform these types of services and he said that at the time he was unaware the extent of contracted services the county was using.

When asked how much the county has saved by bringing these duties “in house,” officials could not provide The Eagle with an exact number.

“It’s awful tough to come up with an exact savings because we don’t have anyone just assigned to mowing,” Supervisors Chairman Eddie Dean said after the meeting.

The county’s 2007-2008 fiscal year budget included about $117,000 for “outside services” in the facilities and maintenance department section of the budget. The following fiscal year, the budget was approved to include an additional $42,000 toward those services, but before the end of the year that increase was apparently eliminated and then reduced again for the coming fiscal year’s budget – bringing its facilities and maintenance outside services budget to about $100,000, according to the document.

While the majority of the county-maintained properties are county-owned, a few are privately-owned. These include a patch of land where the town’s water tower was formerly located, which is owned by the Rapidan Service Authority, and a few small areas around the county that include grant-funded welcome-type signs surrounded by landscaping and flowers.

Arrington suggested county officials talk to RSA about taking over maintenance of that land, which Shifflett said takes about 20 minutes to mow and Robertson said was nearby other county-owned properties employees mow off Thrift Road.

Although at the moment the county’s buildings’ cleaning needs are covered, the county administrator told the board, when the courthouse – which is currently undergoing renovation and expansion – is put back into use it will create a “significant” amount of space that will need cleaning, she said.
“We haven’t really planned for that,” Robertson told the supervisors.

Currently, the county – which previously worked with an outside company to provide cleaning services – has two part-time cleaning employees that are able to work at most 37.5 hours each a week.

The Madison County Sheriff’s Office uses an inmate from Central Virginia Regional Jail to clean its building, however that service can only be used if the person is guarded by a law enforcement officer at all times, which is not feasible in most of the county’s other buildings, officials said at the meeting.