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Health See other Health Articles Title: Jefferson County braces for the worst on Monday Jefferson County officials earlier this year predicted severely reduced services if the county's financial crisis was left unsolved. That day arrives Monday. Residents face long lines to renew car tags and driver licenses, to record deeds and mortgages, and will wait weeks for an inspector to check development and construction projects. Should a storm rip through the county, damaging highways and bridges, county crews will not be able to make repairs to most roads because the manpower will not be available, department officials said. "It will be catastrophic," Commissioner Jim Carns said. "It will change county government as we have known it up to this point. It will not be pretty." On Saturday, county officials said 965 workers were placed on unpaid administrative leave, one step needed to slice $75 million from the budget to make up for the loss of the occupational tax and business license fee. Jefferson County has about 3,600 workers, but two of the county's largest agencies -- the sheriff's office and Cooper Green Mercy Hospital, each with more than 700 employees -- were not touched by the personnel moves. The Alabama Supreme Court in June rejected the county's request to keep spending revenue from the 0.5 percent job tax while the county appeals a judge's ruling that the levy is illegal. The county has asked the state Legislature to restore or replace the Jefferson County occupational tax, which has accounted for a quarter of the county's general fund. Legislators meet Tuesday -- four days after the closing of satellite courthouses and the mass reduction of government -- to discuss whether to reenact the job tax on the salaries of many people who work in the county. Supporters hope Gov. Bob Riley can call a special session as soon as Aug. 10 for lawmakers to address the worst financial crisis in the county's history. What to expect No matter what happens with lawmakers, residents will begin Monday to feel the effects of the near-shutdown of government in the state's most populous county. Some of what they'll see includes: Fewer inspections of new construction and existing buildings. Longer waits for building, plumbing, gas and electrical permits and certificates of occupancy. Slower inspection and maintenance of traffic lights. Delays in the appointment of guardians and in conducting commitment hearings for the mentally incompetent. "I don't want to sound like an alarmist, but the level of county government that the citizens of this county have enjoyed in Jefferson County is about to be compromised," said Chriss Doss, a former state legislator and county commissioner. "And you do not restore and repair such overnight." County officials say they can't even begin to prepare for what they may confront this week with dozens of their employees on leave and the ones left behind on reduced 32-hour workweeks. "We're not absolutely sure that we can keep the buildings open," said Jeff Smith, director of the county's general services department. "We're going to do the absolute best with what we have left." Among the county workers sent home Friday were 135 of 308 employees in the general services department, Smith said. That means the county now has two electricians, two plumbers and one air-conditioner technician to cover Cooper Green Mercy Hospital, the Birmingham and Bessemer courthouses, Birmingham and Bessemer jails, Family Court, the 2121 Building, and six sheriff's substations, Smith said. Normally, the county would have 18 workers to handle electrical, water, sewer and janitorial services at those facilities, he said. But that may not even be the biggest challenge for his department, Smith said. His skeleton staff must monitor electronics systems in 4.1 million square feet of county buildings. "Under electronics you have fire alarms, smoke detectors, card access, fire sprinklers, security systems for the judges," he said. "You might be able to run a courthouse without an air-conditioner, but it's not safe to run a courthouse without a fire alarm system." All departments affected Some departments will not be affected by the cutbacks, at least not yet. Those include the sheriff's office, because a Circuit Court judge has blocked budget cuts until county commissioners and the sheriff can work out an agreement; Cooper Green Mercy Hospital, which gets most of its money from the indigent care fund; and the coroner's office, which was spared cuts. But even those departments rely on the ones decimated by staff reductions. "Everything is intermingled," said Chief Deputy Coroner Pat Curry. "If the doctors are in the morgue and they're doing autopsies and the lights go out there's .¤.¤. (two) electrician for the county. We say we're not losing any of our investigators to layoffs. But what happens with the payroll clerk that's supposed to do the paychecks. There's nobody to do the payroll." County Treasurer Jennifer Parsons Champion said workers in the sheriff's office, probate court, tax collector, tax assessor and other departments will all have problems getting paychecks because she's lost four of her seven employees. "It's going to slow up processing checks. It's going to slow vendors getting paid. I don't think we even realize how this is going to affect everyone that lives in the county," she said. Department heads and elected officials say the crisis creates problems beyond the ones they're used to dealing with. The county informed Cooper Green Mercy Hospital that it will no longer handle indigent burials as of Saturday. Dr. Sandral Hullett, head of the hospital, said that means nursing homes, hospitals and others who have been sending deceased people to the hospital for processing will have to make other funeral arrangements. "How am I going to take them if I have no way to bury them?" Hullett said. In the past, the county's morgue has held the bodies while the hospital verifies the person's information. The county picks up the bodies once a week to bury in a field in a simple wooden casket built by county workers. Last year there were 87 such burials, Hullett said. So far this year there have been 47. But no more, Hullett said. If the county is not going to bury the bodies, the morgue can't have corpses stacking up, she said. Wayne Sullivan, director of the roads department, said his staff could not handle cleanup should a hurricane, tornado or any sizable storm cut through the county. "The folks who have the capability to respond are Birmingham, Hoover, Vestavia Hills, Mountain Brook, and we will ask them to work with us to try to get this cleaned up," said Sullivan, whose staff was reduced from 437 to 89. Frank Humber, director of the land development department, said zoning cases and property inspections will be slowed with his staff down to 21 from 29. "Zoning regulates the use of property. It's just as important what's not allowed to go on somebody's property as what is allowed," he said. "What zoning does is prevents people from doing things that are going to be a problem. Like a commercial use in a residential area." Humber also said that residents should expect to wait weeks before seeing workers sent to inspect development. That work used to take days. "When somebody's neighbor begins a commercial enterprise it's going to take us a long time before we can address it, investigate it and deal with it," he said. William Mullins, director of the county's Inspection Services department, saw his staff downsized from 28 to eight. That could jeopardize safety at hundreds of homes, businesses and churches, he has said. The department inspects all new construction and examines existing buildings when there are modifications, renovations or a change in occupancy. 'My heart is heavy' Interim Finance Director Travis Hulsey, who oversees the revenue department, said he is concerned about maintaining an effective level of service "just based on the staffing we have." His department is likely to be one of those hardest hit. Residents who got their tags and licenses from the now closed satellite courthouses in Homewood, Fultondale, Gardendale and Center Point must now travel to the Birmingham and Bessemer Courthouses where the staff was reduced from 155 workers to 52. Hulsey, who worked some 16- to 17-hour days during the past two months, said he's crushed by what the crisis has done to county residents and employees. "My heart is heavy having to place those individuals on administrative leave without pay," he said. "We have a number of employees who were single parents with children, who were sole breadwinners for their families. That's heartbreaking for me." Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: DeaconBenjamin (#0)
With a quick search of the internet, it looks like Jefferson County's Birmingham Casino is doin' a boomin' business. What we have here, is just another fatality of WIDESPREAD CASINO GAMBLING, and THEIR "SUCKER" GAMES CLEANING OUT THE NATIVES.
Promising signs that the "Great Depression" is beginning to show some necessary results. The next step has to be voter/taxpayer insistence that the county handle only essential services like policing, fire, ambulance and roadways maintenance and eliminate all perfunctory bureaucratic functions. These would include annual licensing of vehicles and operators. The annual registration is total redundancy; once a vehicle is registered that should be good as long as it is being used and is in safe condition, something police and a certified mechanic can determine. Same applies to the operator's license: good for life and validated by a doctor in the case of aging geezers. If a "second opinion" is deemed necessary on a plumbing, electrical or other building job, there's no reason it can't be gotten from another tradesman. About all a county needs to do is publicize alerts to guard against common mistakes in the trades, making this information widely available so interested citizens can do their own "inspections."
An easy way to handle building inspections is to license Certified Construction Inspectors - and then have endorsements for which area they are qualified in i.e., electrical, plumbing, etc., ... Then you enact heavy financial penalties for fraud to make it unprofitable to take a payoff - with criminal penalties if someone is injured or killed as a result of fraud.
"I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is Mass Psychology...It's importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda...Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated." Bertrand Russel, Eugenicist and Logician
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