gronberg@heraldsun.com; 419-6648
DURHAM -- City Manager Tom Bonfield on Thursday had elected officials postpone until Oct. 22 a renewed debate on whether Durham should outsource pre-hiring check-ups and other medical services it offers employees.
Bonfield earlier in the week had indicated he wanted the proposal discussed as "a priority item" during Thursday's City Council work session, as the decision's timing would have follow-on effects on several contractual matters.
But the manager after securing the postponement indicated that he and his staff need more time to prepare for the debate.
"Too many issues were coming in too many different directions," he said. "Quite frankly, I wasn't comfortable with such short notice that we could aptly answer them."
Bonfield add that he also doesn't "have all the answers to all the questions I have in my mind." He would not elaborate.
The debate centers on a Finance Department proposal to do away with its three-person employee heath services unit and instead sign a deal with Duke Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
The city's in-house unit in addition to doing health screenings of new hires is the first stop for workers who've been injured on the job.
It employs a registered nurse, a practical nurse and a receptionist.
If the council approves the outsourcing proposal, the three women in those jobs would go through the city's "reduction in force" process. That in theory offers them a chance to find other jobs with the city.
But in practical terms the receptionist is the only one with a chance of finding anything on the city payroll. The city government has no other nursing positions.
Officials have said they're willing to relay the names and resumes of the two nurses employees to Duke Health System. Its health system, like UNC Health Care in nearby Chapel Hill, is advertising numerous openings for nurses.
Administrators as of Monday were estimating that outsourcing the unit's work to Duke Health would save taxpayers about $249,340 a year. The majority of that would come from not having to pay the workers' salaries.
The affected workers have fought back, lobbying City Council members in public and in private.
They maintain that outsourcing could expose the city to hidden costs, and have said poor management higher up in the Finance Department has caused morale problems in their unit and other parts of Durham's risk-management operation.
The employee-medical proposal is the second major cost-cutting idea administrators have floated since Bonfield took over last year, and the second to run into problems with the council.
The other involved a move to take recycling collections in house. The Solid Waste Management Department has done that, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process, but it needs a contractor to sort and re-sell the goods it picks up.
But the selection of that contractor has been stymied at the council level, thanks in part to lobbying of elected officials by several of the companies that are bidding for the job.
Some sense of the questions coming up behind the scenes was provided by Bill Taylor, a consultant and former city official who wrote Bonfield and The Herald-Sun on Thursday to say outsourcing the employee-medical unit could cause Durham's workman's compensation bills to balloon.
City-employed nurses, Taylor said, are in a better position than outside medical personnel to detect and stop malingering that would otherwise cost taxpayers money.
He noted that doctors and nurses at Duke Health work with many other employers in the area.
But while they're "excellent caregivers, they are not capable of knowing the tasks these employees perform in their jobs and are often misled by inaccurate or exaggerated descriptions of tasks," he said.
A city nurse, by contrast, "knows the workers, knows the jobs and knows who the frequent fliers are" who try to abuse the system, he said.
