This week, 38 detention officers and three sergeants with Pinal County Sheriff’s Office were informed they were out of a job.
Their reduction-in-force notifications bring the total PCSO job eliminations since May to 112. That is the number of cuts recommended by a report from consultant MGT of America.
The notices were delivered in person by PCSO staff on Monday.
To say Sheriff Paul Babeu is unhappy with the situation is to understate his aggravation and the emotional impact the cuts had on the department.
“It’s not the way to run a government,” Babeu said. “It’s ridiculous that this happened.”
The 112 cuts included one captain, three sergeants and all of the corporals. The overwhelming majority were detention officers.
The RIF is linked directly to a canceled contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which paid PCSO to house its detainees. An audit indicated ICE was under-paying PCSO compared to locations in the rest of the country.
“We were losing $3.2 million a year. It was a bad contract from the beginning,” County Supervisor Anthony Smith said.
Pinal County received an average of $11 million per year from ICE to house the detainees. The current cuts add up to less than $8 million, but the county is also adding estimated savings in overtime, food and utilities.
To make up the remaining gap, Smith said the county will be data-crunching when they receive the rest of the MGT report. He said officials specifically want to look at why the jail population is so large when crime numbers are down.
“Absolutely everything we were told is that this would save money,” Babeu said. “In fact, now we see through these figures that there is no saving of money. In fact, we’re losing far more money, and there are 112 Pinal County residents who are providers of their families who are out of a job. Quite frankly, I’m very disturbed by this.”
Babeu echoed earlier statements from County Manager Greg Stanley that the jail cannot return to pre-ICE staffing because of “overcrowded” conditions even without the ICE detainees. The sheriff also claimed the new board members, in trying to make good conditions, were given bad data and bad advice.
“The audit by Kate Witek, who’s a wonderful woman, presented … figures based on 400 detainees,” Babeu said. “The average daily population was 537. We were on an uptick before this action was taken.”
He said that created a “false floor” from which the new supervisors based their decision.
But Smith said the board had good information and good advice. “We acted prudently all along the way.”
When the county tried to renegotiate with ICE in February, the federal agency was unresponsive to phone calls and emails. Smith said while the situation did overlap ICE’s crisis of underage immigrants at the border, there still should have been a response.
After the county issued a 100-day notice of ending the contract, the sheriff internally froze hiring the first week in May. That, Babeu said, started natural attrition when the contract ended in the summer. That resulted in about 70 positions being eliminated.
The county approved a RIF policy in June. The ICE contract ended in July.
MGT’s staffing study was released in December. It included four options, of which the county approved Option B, with the advice to cut 112 positions, including those already eliminated.
The rankings of the RIF candidates were based 50 percent on performance, 40 percent on conduct and 10 percent on qualifications. Seniority did not matter under the RIF policy.
The highest staffing level was 342. They are now at 230. All laid-off employees have first right to compete for vacancies. Because of the hiring freeze, there were six vacancies at the detention aide level for those who wished to compete. Seven detention officers were hired as deputies after going through training. They also have priority placement for other county jobs.
The Department of Corrections is providing testing for staff to become DOC officers at the large prison complex in Florence, where there are 300 jobs open.
Some of those cut from PCSO have more than a decade with the department. Babeu said something many of the staff were not prepared for was the survivor’s guilt of not being cut when so many were.
Smith, who remembered being a casualty of a RIF process himself, said the supervisors are being careful in how they discuss the issue. “It’s families we’re dealing with,” he said.
