Kenton County Jailer Terry Carl takes exception to a recent characterization by Judge-Executive Steve Arlinghaus related to overtime costs at the county jail.
“What they didn’t tell me was, I was inheriting a jail spending $80,000 a month in overtime, or $1 million a year,” Arlinghaus said at a Monday candidates forum hosted by the Kenton County Republican Women’s Club, of the previous county administration and its budget woes.
It’s a figure Arlinghaus has used multiple times previously to illustrate several areas of savings he has brought as the county’s top elected official and is usually accompanied by a restructuring at the county golf course and other examples. But the statement inspired Carl to respond on Wednesday. “I would like to set the record straight on recent misinformation being spread by Steve Arlinghaus,” Carl said in a statement. “His comments about our jail are not just misleading but straight up untrue.”
About the $1 million figure, “This statement is not even close to being true. We never spent $80,000 in overtime in a month, ever. I am not sure why he would intentionally misrepresent our jail and the quality of work that my staff is doing.”
Numbers put together by Kenton County Treasurer Roy Cox as requested by Arlinghaus Wednesday do show that the jail spent $79,232 in November 2010 and $79,565 in December 2010.
“If the situation had not been addressed, overtime costs would have escalated to an estimated $1 million a year,” Arlinghaus said in a statement on Wednesday. “I brought this situation to the attention of Jailer Carl and he offered no solutions. I told the jailer if he would not or could not fix the problem, I would. And I did.”
Arlinghaus said he began to work on correcting “this very alarming situation” by enlisting the help of a special finance assistant, former County Treasurer Ivan Frye, to work with Carl and the jail’s staff on a remedy. The Judge-Executive and Frye, Arlinghaus said, proposed a solution of hiring part-time employees to reduce overtime, “a suggestion the jailer and his staff initially resisted but at my insistence ultimately accepted”.
But Carl said Wednesday that Arlinghaus is actually responsible for an increase in overtime costs.
During the transitional period that took place when the jail’s operations moved from its former building on Court Street to a newly constructed facility in South Covington, there were certain procedures that could only take place with overtime, Carl said. Those procedures included training in the new facility, transferring inmates to the new location, as well as installing and testing new security systems and protocols. “All of this was on top of maintaining regular and safe staffing levels at the old jail until the new facility was complete,” Carl said. “This goes without mentioning the unprecedented increase in the incarcerated population in our county due to the increasing heroin and drug abuse in our region.”
Carl said that during the transitional period, three external staffing consultations were conducted, one by a state correctional organization, one at the request of Carl, and another by former Judge-Executive Ralph Drees. “All of these reports came back and said we were grossly understaffed for the population we were working with,” Carl said.
The jailer determined that he needed to add fourteen positions. “When I approached the newly sworn-in Arlinghaus in January (2011) about these hiring needs he told me that he didn’t care about the consultants’ numbers and drug out the process of hiring new staff,” Carl said. “His inaction caused an even higher increase in overtime over a longer time than it needed to be. My team and I fixed this problem and brought our staff up to the necessary levels. Arlinghaus has not had any positive impact on my staffing needs and has not mentioned this issue until he started running for re-election.”
Overtime costs did drop after the November and December 2010 numbers of more than $79,000. In the first nine months of 2011, four months saw overtime costs of over $60,000, another two with more than $50,000, and one at more than $40,000. August 2011 was the least expensive in terms of overtime with a cost of $29,156.
The numbers then drop precipitously starting in October 2011 where overtime costs hit a total of $2,817 and lower than that over the following two months. For six of the first nine months of 2012, the overtime costs were mostly in the low four-figure range with the highest total coming in August 2012 at more than $23,000.
“We currently have the lowest annual overtime expense in our county’s history,” Carl said. “This is because of the team I have assembled and the responsible way I have managed the taxpayers’ dollars with the new facility, not because of the sudden revelation of a politician.”
Arlinghaus’s opponent in the May 20 Republican primary election for Judge-Executive, Kenton County Commissioner Kris Knochelmann, called the situation, “Arlinghaus math”.
“It just never seems to add up. I’ve dealt with it since literally the first month he’s been in office,” Knochelmann said.Â
“I just think Terry (Carl) standing up and calling (Arlinghaus) on the carpet is great and has been long overdue. I think calling him out on it as a half truth that Steve Arlinghaus continues to spout off almost every time he tries to talk, he’s been frustrated with it for three years and the public can see it now that Terry points it out.”
“The very frustrating part is Terry is a very frugal operator,” Knochelmann continued. “You cannot take a couple months of savings and say, look what I’ve saved for the next twenty years. It’s just ridiculous. (Arlinghaus) is assuming that $79,000 would continue forever. It’s just ridiculous. Terry would never have allowed that. It’s just one of those unfortunate things that becomes a little quote you can toss out and keep repeating and ultimately becomes fact when it really isn’t a fact.”
“It appears Arlinghaus has forgotten that even though we had high overtime in 2010-2011, the jail as a whole still came in under budget,” Carl said. “I do not like to brag but when someone speaks ill of the men and women on my staff who work hard to save taxpayers’ dollars, I can’t sit quiet any longer.”
“I understand he is worried about his reelection campaign but our jail is not a political puppet. The jail is one of the county’s most important assets. I wish the judge would stop spreading misinformation about our jail.”
“The numbers don’t lie,” Arlinghaus said. “I’m not criticizing the jailer nor his staff. What I am doing, and what I have been doing for nearly a year, is talking about the hands-on approach I have taken to improving financial management, reducing spending, and making government more efficient in Kenton County.”
Note:Â A previous version of this article identified Kenton Co. Treasurer Roy Cox incorrectly as Roy Clark
Written by Michael Monks, editor & publisher of The River City News
Photo:Â Kenton Co. Detention Center rendering by Turner Cosntruction
