Executive vice chancellor reminds forum idea is legislature's, not UNC's
Executive Vice Chancellor Elson Floyd told the Employee Forum earler this month he wanted to make it clear consideration of privatizing University functions was not an idea initiated at Carolina.
At the direction of the legislature, the UNC system's Board of Governors has been working on a study concerning the potential savings through privatization. The board last week voted to ask UNC system administrators to study and implement privatization where appropriate. (See story, page 4.)
Floyd said some employees and students thought local campus administrators were considering privatization, which also is sometimes called outsourcing. Carolina officials only submitted information to the UNC system's General Administration for its study, he said.
"We are not engaged in any effort to privatize housekeeping on this campus," Floyd said. "That is not our issue."
He said some people were directing their criticisms of privatization at the local campus leadership when it was being considered by the legislature.
"The bottom line, however, is that we are not interested in the privatization of services as it relates to housekeeping," Floyd said. "We've stated that repeatedly. We will continue to do so."
Concerning the reorganization of the administration, Floyd said many of the new reporting relationships changed as of April 1. He said he hoped most of the remaining pieces would be in place by July.
The intent of the reorganization was to identify the provost as the University's chief academic officer and to clarify accountability of Carolina's administrative activities.
"The chancellor believes that the reorganization accomplished both goals and we very much look forward to your working with us to make it successful," Floyd told the delegates.
Sue Morand (physiology) asked Floyd whether individual departments would be affected by an upcoming Internal Revenue Service audit of the University. The IRS has been auditing universities to determine whether they have properly reported their various types of income.
"Not only will it have an impact on some individual departments, but everything we do," he said. "We're going to have to respond pretty quickly to those requests. We will try to coordinate that in ways that will be the least disruptive."
Career Counselor proposed
The forum adopted a resolution asking the chancellor to use the Staff Development Fund for a pilot career counselor project.
Sharon Cheek (contracts and grants), chair of the Career Development Committee, said the fund, begun during the Bicentennial Campaign, would have enough money by September 1997 to pay for a time-limited, part-time position.
The counselor would be available to all faculty and staff for counseling on an individual or group basis, according to the resolution. The counselor also would coach employees through the Transfer Opportunities Program and help employees assess their interests and career options, the resolution said.
Cheek pointed out that the Task Force on Women at Carolina in its report last month also proposed establishment of a career counselor position. Cheek said her committee proposed that if Chancellor Michael Hooker agreed to establish the position, money from the staff development fund could be used to help pay for it.
Pan-University funds
The forum adopted a statement in which it laid out its top priorities for pan-University funding in the 1996-97 budget year.
Delegate Ned Brooks (health affairs) said many worthy programs were supported with pan-University funds.
"What we were trying to do was single out those relatively few ones that we thought that we all would think would be the most important to the employees of the University," Brooks said.
The programs endorsed by the forum, in alphabetical order:
*Access for the handicapped.
*Campus diversity training project.
*Child care.
*Employee Appreciation Fair.
*Employee Forum chair/staff support.
*HEELS for health wellness program.
*Point-to-Point.
*Staff training.
*University Gazette.
The statement also said the forum would appreciate being given the opportunity to make recommendations prior to the final decisions of the Pan University Allocations Committee.
Health Affairs deck tickets
Peter Schledorn (research services), chair of the Personnel Policies Committee, presented a draft of a letter prepared by the committee criticizing a Transportation and Parking policy concerning the ticketing of employees' vehicles parked in the visitor section of the Health Affairs deck.
The forum discussed last month complaints from employees who had been ticketed while parking in the deck for a medical appointment or patient visit.
"Basically, we came to the conclusion that it's a very unwise thing for a government agency to be handing out citations to citizens in the absence of any positive evidence that there has been a law or regulation broken," Schledorn said.
Transportation and Parking Director Michael Klein said his department already was doing all it could to address the problems of the ticketing policy and that most of them had been settled.
Klein said DTP had been working with UNC Hospitals, the School of Dentistry and the Ambulatory Care Center to establish a credential that could be given to employees who were patients or visitors. The credential would be shown to the parking attendant to void any tickets.
"We have not been having significant problems in the last few weeks," Klein said. "We've solved most of the problem already. We did have some unexpected consequences, but once we became aware of them we started to address them and I think most of that has been taken care of."
The forum, however, voted to have Schledorn send the letter.
Adverse weather
The forum postponed until next month a vote on a proposed resolution from the Personnel Policies Committee that would ask for changes in state personnel policy regarding adverse weather.
The delay will allow time for the Personnel Policies Committee to work into the resolution language that addressed concerns raised by a delegate and Associate Vice Chancellor for Human Resources Laurie Charest.
The resolution was drafted to make a change in the section of the state's administrative code that says heads of agencies may close an agency during life-threatening weather conditions, Schledorn. The committee's proposal was to add severe snow and ice storms as an example of life-threatening weather conditions.
George Sharp (laboratory animal medicine) said he thought the committee's language needed to be clearer concerning who decided whether the weather was too dangerous to allow getting to campus.
Charest said the way the resolution was worded meant that employees required to come to work in icy weather would be paid the same thing as employees allowed to stay home. Schledorn said the committee's intent was to have employees required to work during severe snow and ice storms compensated with compensatory time off.
Charest also said a change in the administrative code envisioned by the resolution didn't require legislative action as the resolution suggested, but could be done by the State Personnel Committee.
Personnel policy brief
Drake Maynard, director of Human Resources Administration, briefed the forum on a proposed policy revision to be presented to the legislature that would give universities and state agencies more flexibility in how much they could pay laid-off state employees. State law requires laid-off employees be paid the salary they were making when they lost their job, Maynard said.
That has caused problems for agencies that don't have the funding to match an employee's previous pay, Maynard said. The new language would give employers flexibility to offer a salary within a percentage range of the laid-off employees' previous pay. Maynard said they were considering a range of 10 percent below and above the previous salary.
"That would give people a little more flexibility in hoping to encourage folks to re-employ individuals who have been separated due to a layoff," he said.
Black cultural center
The forum also heard a presentation by Gerald Horne, director of the Sonja Haynes Stone Black Cultural Center, who described some of the center's activities and encouraged employees to support construction of the center's new building.
Horne said the building would help relieve the University's space crunch by providing library, classroom and performance space that would be open to everyone.
"It will be part of the UNC community, but it has a particular focus, intellectually and academically," he said.
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