Officials have assessed which of their employees can work from home and which have to work at the office to maintain basic, mandatory functions of government.
The Stark County commissioners have held four meetings by conference call. The first meeting on March 25, all three commissioners were present in one room in the County Office Building, and the public was encouraged to call in rather than physically attend.
After the Ohio General Assembly authorized remote voting by local officials, one commissioner on April 1 voted from outside the office. Since then, all three commissioners now vote remotely in weekly meetings, coming into the office separately to sign documents.
Members of the public can listen in. But they can't address the commissioners in the conference call. But the commissioners office is accepting public comment at commissionerspublicspeaks@starkcountyohio.gov.
"We're in uncharted territory. Everybody likes to see everybody's faces," Stark County Administrator Brant Luther said late last month.
But as of mid-April, "the lion's share of (county) employees are working from home," he said.
In late March, nearly every commissioners office and county human resources employee was working in the County Office Building. Now roughly 10 out of 17 of those workers are working from home, with most of them rotating in and out. To avoid a major disruption to operations if both of them were to be infected, Luther and the county's budget director, Chris Nichols, have avoided working in the office at the same time for more than a week. One will work at home for two or three days each week with the other in the office.
The Stark County Treasurer's office no longer takes property tax payments in person.
Real estate companies can no longer file property transfers in person at the Stark County Auditor's office. They have to file them electronically, file by mail or drop it off. The Stark County Recorder's office has closed its front area to the public since around March 23. The Stark County Department of Job and Family Services has suspended public access to its lobby, once filled with people applying for benefits.
Paperwork
Stark County Auditor Alan Harold said electronic filing of property transfers with his office, a service available the last year, have doubled from 40% of all transactions to 80%. Documents can also be electronically filed with the recorder's office.Employees who still report to work at county offices have to stay at least six feet apart. Shifts are staggered to minimize the number in the office at any one time, officials say.
However, because many bills, payments, purchase orders, invoices, budget transfer requests and government actions are largely on paper and have to be signed, some employees, especially in the county commissioners' office, have to be at the County Office Building to process those documents and those left in drop boxes by the public.
Contractors bidding for county projects still leave bids on paper at the commissioners' office and by law those still must be opened in the presence of the bidders, said Luther. Applicants for government benefits through Job and Family Services continue to submit documents on paper proving that they have low incomes.
"We cannot just shut down and go home," Luther said late last month. "We certainly use (electronic documents) the best we can. It's a hybrid system where much of it is paper driven. ... But at the end of the day, to move that train you actually have to be in the locomotive at some point."
And he added, "You can't just assume that just because they're a county employee that they live in the city core and have the ideal internet hookup."
Other changes
Employees of the county's Sanitary Sewer Department are no longer riding together in vehicles. Inspectors leave from home to inspect sites. And Sanitary Sewer employees can't obviously work from home to maintain the county's sewage system."You cannot address sewer backups from your living room," said Luther. "In fact, there may be a sewer backup in your living room."
The dozen employees of the Facilities Department report to work to maintain county buildings and with masks and gloves to vigilantly clean surfaces in county offices to lower the risk of infection, said Luther.
To protect the security of county financial records and taxpayer information, Harold and Stark County Treasurer Alex Zumbar say they're not allowing employees to bring sensitive information home. Zumbar added that employees can only view bank balances for county accounts, transfer funds and access tax billing records in the office.
Sean Durkin, Stark County's director of information technology, said his department has set up 175 new secure virtual private network connections. Now a total of about 250 county employees can access virtual work desktops or their actual work computers from home.
He said a couple of county departments have actually had employees take desktop or laptop work computers home or allowed them to use home computers.
He said the statewide high-speed broadband network has substantially increased the county's bandwidth during the crisis without additional charge. And the county's servers can accommodate about a thousand employees working remotely if necessary.
Durkin said the county's IT department has 28 employees and all of them are working from home except one to three people maintaining the county's hardware and software when they have to have physical access.
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