Madison Holds Off On Filling Key Town Position, Officials Look For Savings

By Jack Kramer, Correspondent

MADISON, CT – Madison has decided to hold off, for now, on filling the town engineer position recently vacated by Mike Ott, who resigned. A combination of factors has gone into that decision, according to First Selectman Tom Banisch, who reported that decision recently to the Board of Selectmen.

Banisch said: “With the current economic environment in Connecticut, I believe that we should not start any new big projects. We should finish the ones we started, do what is needed in town to improve our infrastructure and put projects that are not critical on hold.

“I believe that we need to coordinate purchasing in town to achieve savings that we may be missing by not having centralized purchasing. Furthermore, if that job were to be shared with the Public Schools, as we do with many other jobs in town, we could potentially achieve even greater economies of scale through a coordinated purchasing program,” Banisch added.

“I firmly believe that, in time, this position could possibly pay for itself through accrued savings. We recently did a salary survey to determine what would be a competitive salary for that position. For about half of what we were paying our Town Engineer, we can hire a Purchasing Agent or Purchasing Manager.

Banisch continued: “By splitting the cost with the School Department, it would effectively be a quarter of the cost, creating a real savings. I’ve spoken with the Superintendent of schools and he agrees that it would be worthwhile. Knowing that we have the engineering department duties covered by existing staff and that funding for the position is already budgeted for the second half of the fiscal year, I’d like to begin the discussion with the Board of Selectmen about hiring a Purchasing Agent so that we can have the position filled by January 1, 2018. I think this will help us to save money in the long term and make our town operations more efficient.”

Banisch said the duties previously performed by Ott have been assigned to others.

“By paring down the relevant duties and making sure that the critical ones are covered in-house, we are able to keep the department running smoothly. For projects that are beyond our capabilities, we will deal with an appropriate contractor for the job for project engineering, design and project management. In this way we can effectively eliminate one position, reorganize the engineering department as a unit of Public Works and save the salary that was previously associated with that position,” Banisch said.