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Legislature salutes winning suggestions

By Melanie Lekocevic

CATSKILL — When a business wants to make improvements, sometimes the best ideas can come from the people who are down in the trenches every day — the employees. Running a county is no different.

That’s why the Greene County Legislature created the Suggestion Awards in 2007, and implemented the program for the first time this year. The awards were given to the employees who came up with the best ideas for improving how local government operates.

This year’s winning employees were Therese McGee Ward, whose idea was designed to improve employees’ mental health and morale, and Tammy Sciavillo, who found a way to save county money by reducing the amount of paper that is generated by the Legislature itself.

“The Suggestion Program was initiated by Chairman Wayne Speenburgh in 2007 to come up with a way to use the minds and ideas of the very talented workforce we have here in Greene County,” said Legislator Bill Lawrence, who coordinated the effort.

So county leaders put out the call to employees, challenging them to come up with effective ideas that could make the county run better. And to make sure everything was on the up and up, the whole process was anonymous — no one knew who made a particular suggestion until a final decision was made by the committee.

And the ideas came rushing in. Each was evaluated based on several criteria: whether the suggestion improved service, reduced delays, improved office procedures, and so on. Suggestions went through a series of reviews to judge their efficacy, and whether they would succeed in a real work environment.

“We wanted to make sure there was a method for employees to submit ideas that could be reviewed just on their merits,” Legislator Forest Cotten said. “No one else is more suited to improve departments than the people who work in them.”

Any county employee was eligible to submit a suggestion, and Lawrence said he looked at similar programs at the state and federal level to generate ideas for how the Greene County program would operate.

In addition to winning a plaque for their suggestions, Ward and Sciavillo were awarded gift certificates based on the cost savings their ideas were expected to generate, Legislator Dorothy Prest said.

Ward’s idea is designed to improve the mental health of county employees. The original idea was geared toward social services caseworkers, giving them a quarterly group session with a mental health specialist, but the committee liked the concept so much that they extended it to all departments who deal with the public, like the Department of Corrections, the County Clerk’s Office, the Sheriff’s Department, and others.

Not only does the idea provide employees with quarterly group meetings, “which will help reduce stress and improve their health,” but “a hotline for emergency needs, as well as additional training for these employees to add to their skill set,” said Legislator Karen Deyo. The objective is to improve morale, employee health and retention, and reduce the number of sick days employees take.

Sciavillo’s winning suggestion will help reduce paper use and save the county money. Meetings of the Greene County Legislature generate countless resolutions, agendas and back-up materials, all of which are printed and distributed to the legislators and general public. Instead, Sciavillo’s idea was to include those materials on the county’s Web site, so legislators can print out only the items they want to have on hand.

“The Suggestion Review Committee saw the value of this idea and implemented it almost immediately,” Deyo said. “There are still some paper copies being made, but the amount of paper use has shrunk significantly.”

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