By Kari Lucin
The Jamestown Sun
JAMESTOWN, N.D. — The Stutsman County Correctional Center is looking for a new jail administrator, following the Jan. 1 resignation of Tracey Trapp.
“Thank you for the opportunities that have been given to me. I have enjoyed working for Stutsman County and appreciate the support during my tenure,” Trapp wrote in his two-paragraph resignation letter.
His resignation is effective Feb. 1.
Darin Goter will serve as interim jail administrator while a search is conducted for a replacement for Trapp, the Stutsman County Commission decided Tuesday.
Goter has been deputy administrator at the jail since Oct. 1, 2012, and prior to that, he served as a sergeant. As deputy administrator, he helped implement new training programs for the jail staff, as recommended by a jail consultant.
Most likely, the county will hire someone from outside the Stutsman County Correctional Center for the jail administrator position, County Auditor/Chief Operating Officer Casey Bradley said.
“How difficult is this individual going to be to find? That’s what concerns me,” said Mark Klose, commission chairman.
Bradley said the county would concentrate its efforts on regional and national advertisements for the position.
However, he did say it would likely be March before the position could be filled.
The county will be looking for “somebody that’s proactive and hopefully has good experience in corrections, looking at expanding the training availability, beefing up our policies and procedures and definitely somebody that’s got supervisory experience and educational background,” Bradley said.
County commissioners also approved carryover requests for vacation hours Tuesday, for employees who were unable for work-related reasons to take earned vacation time, so that their vacation time would continue to accrue and carry over to 2014 rather than being lost.
Many of the requested carryovers were for SCCC personnel.
“Basically, the sergeants worked without getting their vacation time or utilizing their holiday time because it was not communicated that there was (staffing) shortages that needed to be addressed,” Bradley said, noting that “communication failed big time.”
Staffing changes following a 2012 jail study had been made, but with the understanding that “if there was a situation where obviously they needed more staffing and we needed to make some adjustments, they were to bring them to us,” Bradley explained, but apparently that didn’t happen.
The Law Enforcement Center Board had even authorized a number of higher-level correctional officer positions that could alleviate the staffing issue.
“The administration failed to rewrite the criteria by which staff could be promoted to those positions, therefore no (correctional officers of that level) were promoted, so their shortage there created the shortage or unavailability of sergeants,” Bradley said. “So there’s a significant amount of sergeants that didn’t get their vacation time or holiday time.”
The board that governs the LEC is considering adding another position to the jail as well.
“… the staff is extremely bitter over there,” Bradley said, but they are working with the county to find a way to alleviate the problem. “… they were just happy to know there’s light at the end of the tunnel and we can fix this.”