Program provided cleaning and work crews to municipalities
By: Cara Latham
In just a few weeks, as the season changes, local municipalities might have to fend for themselves when it comes to raking up leaves and cleaning up their facilities.
According to New Hanover Township Business Administrator Geoffrey Urbanik, leaf raking in the fall was one of the jobs taken care of by state Department of Corrections inmates who performed maintenance tasks in municipalities around the state.
About 90 separate labor crews, of generally 10 minimum security inmates with one correctional officer assigned to each, take care of jobs like cleaning, picking up trash, and other projects around the state, according to Community Labor Assistance Program Coordinator William Freeman.
Twelve of those crews were dedicated to the portion of the program known as "Paying Communities Back," which helped out municipalities upon request, said Mr. Freeman. Because each state department had to cut some programs to save money, the state DOC had to cut back the "Paying Communities Back" portion of its community labor assistance program, eliminating help by those 12 crews to municipalities.
It is hard to say which municipalities were affected, he said, because the support could have been given to individual municipalities at various times, like once a year or during a one month period. At the time the cuts occurred, the crews might have been working in some municipalities and not others, he added.
Officials from New Hanover and Bordentown townships and Bordentown City said they have been affected by the cuts.
"We mostly used the labor crew for cleaning up our park and leaf raking in the fall," said Mr. Urbanik. "Right now, I’m not sure what we’re going to do. We’re going to have to provide for leaf raking with our own, probably (by) hiring part-time (workers)."
Mr. Urbanik said he "heard that the governor did not include (the Pay the Communities Back program) in the budget" in July.
State Department of Corrections spokeswoman Deirdre Fedkenheuer said that when the state budget was being formulated early in the year, Gov. Jon Corzine asked every department in the state government to make reductions.
"There are so few reductions we can make," she said, adding that they had to cut the Paying Communities Back portion because it could not cut other costs that would not risk the safety and security of the state. "That always has to be the bottom line for us."
Mr. Urbanik said the has not analyzed how much it would cost because "we hadn’t had to replace that labor yet."
"We’re definitely going to rethink how we do certain things at different times of the year," he said.
Even though the township has not yet assessed what it will do for the coming year, "we’re disappointed that it was cancelled because it is something that benefits the town," he said. "A couple of times a year, we used them to clean up the park. It’s going to make it more inconvenient, and there is going to be a cost to the town."
Bordentown Township Mayor Mark Roselli said that his township has also been affected by the cuts to the program, but that the labor crews stopped coming to Bordentown Township a year ago.
Losing the program was "unfortunate because it helped us," Mayor Roselli said. "They would do the light cleaning. They would wax the floors, and it saved us some time from public works."
After the program stopped a year ago, residents from the nearby juvenile medium security facilities began helping out, but "it didn’t seem to work as well," and that idea was short-lived, Mayor Roselli added.
Because Garden State Youth Correctional Facility in Yardville and Albert C. Wagner Youth Correctional Facility on Ward Avenue in Bordentown are so close, he said he does not see why it is costing the state DOC any money to have the inmates transported to the township to help out. He added that when an emergency occurs at one of the facilities, township police, fire and ambulance services are the first to respond, and calls to the facilities could tie up services for long periods of time.
The burden has been left to the township, as "our public works has to pick up the slack," he said. "It’s a reallocation of resources. You’re taking money away from doing another job because they have to (clean up the work at the community center), and it backs everything up."
If the state wanted to save municipalities money, having the inmate crews help out municipalities was "a no-brainer," Mayor Roselli said. "They took that away, and it had an affect."
Bordentown City Public Works Manager Bob Erickson said the city used the program "extensively," with help from the inmates at the Garden State Youth Correctional Facility.
"They have basically refurbished the Gilder Field municipal stadium," he said, adding that the inmate crew built the entire wall and installed the scoreboard. They also helped in building the two dugouts at the field.
He said the van that transported the inmates to the site cost about $1,300 a year, and it was stopped with the cuts. The crew had also helped with landscaping and grass cutting about three to four times last year.
"I’m appalled that they would cut something like this that doesn’t save that much money," Mr. Erickson said. "It’s a real asset to the community, and now it’s done."
Because the program is defunct and there is no more free help to the city, "it’s really set us back," he said.
"We’re going to have to shelve other projects we would have done because we don’t have the extra help," he said. There is not enough manpower because of the constraints of the budget, whereas in the past, the city’s Public Works crew could be dispersed to other jobs, he said.
Mr. Erickson said he thought the program was beneficial to both the city and the inmates because while working, the inmates also learned how to work in the field.
"The guys who came here from the (correction center) were always extremely well behaved and polite, and (they) worked hard the entire time they were here," he said.
Ms. Fedkenheuer said that despite the cuts in the Paying Communities Back program, the inmate labor program is still active.
"The inmate labor program is still alive and well; it is just that portion (that was cut) because of budgetary concerns," she said, adding that the cut is projected to save $1.6 million.
The remaining inmate labor crews are still performing other jobs around the state like highway cleanup, picking up litter, cutting grass, and working in state parks and along the shoreline, said Mr. Freeman.
But there is hope for those municipalities who want to receive help from the labor crews, according to Ms. Fedkenheuer. "Any municipality or nonprofit can certainly write to us and we will do our best to supply them with our best labor inmate crew," she said.
Aside from picking up leaves and trash, inmates often performed what was requested of them by municipalities. In one case, the labor crews cleaned up a little league field, performed work on a refreshment stand and installed a new dugout.
When asked if the program would be reinstated in the future, she said she was not sure, but "we’re just brand new into the fiscal year."