By Ray Gronberg

gronberg@heraldsun.com; 419-6648

DURHAM -- City Council members have delayed for at least a few days a decision on whether to outsource employee medical services, in part because they're reluctant to OK laying off an in-house medical unit's three employees.

Members also said they want assurances that the contractor administrators want to give the job to, Duke Occupational and Environmental Medicine, will provide service that's at least as good as that offered by the city's in-house staff.

"I want to make sure our staff are well taken care of if the service is going to be outsourced," Councilwoman Cora Cole-McFadden said. "I want the same quality of service for our employees."

Council members discussed the proposal Monday night, and will return to it on Thursday. City Manager Tom Bonfield indicated that he wants it debated as a "priority item" because the decision has follow-on effects on a variety of contractual issues.

Administrators in the city's Finance Department are pushing the outsourcing to save money.

The unit targeted for elimination among other things is responsible for conducting pre-hiring medical check-ups of new employees, and is also the first stop for workers who've been injured on the job.

It employs a registered nurse, a practical nurse and a receptionist.

Last month Finance Department officials estimated that closing the unit would save about $308,683 a year once it takes full effect in fiscal 2010-11.

They backed off a bit on that estimate on Monday, saying the net savings would be about $249,340 a year. Of that, they intend to set aside $100,000 a year to guard against the possibility of incurring extra expenses for testing and other services.

By signing on with Duke, the city would be joining groups like the State Bureau of Investigation and RTI International that rely on Duke to help monitor worker health.

But the employees who might lose their jobs have fought back, lobbying the council behind the scenes and in public against the administration's recommendation.

Bonfield knew going into Monday's council meeting that the effort might influence the debate. "Some of the affected employees have been working the council pretty hard," he said beforehand.

At the meeting, the unit's registered nurse, Delores Blue, warned that the administration might not have accounted for all the extra costs an outside contractor might impose. She estimated that the in-house unit saved taxpayers "a minimum" of $200,000 in fiscal 2008-09.

City e-mails confirm that Blue and other workers have lobbied council members behind closed doors. One message indicated that Blue talked to Mayor Bill Bell in mid-September.

The unit's other nurse, Donna Manning, e-mailed council members on Tuesday. She passed along messages and memos dating from early 2009 that showed workers in the Finance Department's risk-management arm suspected even then that their boss, Interim Deputy Finance Director Arche McAdoo, wanted to outsource employee health services.

Manning also relayed a spreadsheet of results from an employee satisfaction survey showing that morale in the units McAdoo supervises was lower than in other parts of the Finance Department.

McAdoo has been the department's point man in its recent discussions with the council on the outsourcing proposal.

But a memo in the material Manning forwarded also indicated that workers believe employee health services is "grossly understaffed" at present. It said the unit once had a physician's assistant and another full-time registered nurse to help out.

City Council members for several years now have said "core services" - meaning things like police patrols and street paving that directly affect the public - should receive top priority for funding. The Finance Department as a whole ranks as a support operation, meaning it's important more to the internal workings of City Hall.

Regardless, the likelihood of layoffs was the key sticking point on Monday.

One councilman, Howard Clement, noted that while the council approved some layoffs as part of the 2009-10 budget, these would add to the previous authorization and come down in the middle of the fiscal year.

For the affected workers, "it's going to be a cold winter and a not-too-happy holiday season" if they can't quickly find other jobs, he said.