Resident questions qualifications of new county chief clerk
A Franklin Township woman questioned the qualifications of Fayette County’s new chief clerk during a county salary board meeting Wednesday.
Jerrie Mazza of Vanderbilt said that she wanted to make it clear that her comments were not personal toward Amy Revak, a former newspaper reporter from Masontown who was hired last month by Commissioners Vincent Zapotosky and Al Ambrosini.
The questions, Mazza said, were only about Revak’s qualifications for the position, which does include some work with the county’s budget. Revak has a four-year degree in English.
Commissioner Angela M. Zimmerlink, who did not vote to hire Revak, had suggested a candidate with a master’s degree in business administration.
“I was shocked to read that attending commissioner meetings made someone qualified to be chief clerk of Fayette County,” Mazza said, noting that she has attended those meetings for 16 years and has accounting and clerical experience.
“You hired someone with absolutely no qualifications and set her salary at $32,000 and you’re going to pay someone $50 a day to teach her how to do her job,” Mazza said.
Former county manager Warren Hughes, who performed the functions of the chief clerk, along with other jobs, would have come back to do that on a contracted basis no matter who was hired, Zapotosky said.
Dominick Carnicella, human resources director through Felice Associates of Greensburg, said that Revak’s experience qualified her for the position and noted that about 20 percent of the job is budget-related and those numbers come from the controller’s office.
Controller Sean P. Lally, also a member of the salary board, said that the numbers do come from his office staff, and that Revak’s job will be taking those numbers and helping the commissioners analyze them.
“The numbers for the budget are done in my office,” Lally said. “Amy’s role in this .. is to put them together in a format the commissioners can use.”
Zapotosky agreed, noting that he nominated two potential candidates for the clerk’s post, but felt Revak met or exceeded the qualifications for the post.
“I hope my selection was a good one, and I believe it will be,” Zapotosky said. “For her to come under this kind of scrutiny is wrong.”
“I’m saying she don’t have the qualifications,” Mazza said.
“Our HR professional said she did, ma’am, and I’d take his recommendations over yours any day,” Zapotosky said.
Ambrosini said that he also believes Revak will act as the commissioners’ public relations officer.
“We’ve never had one, and we need one,” Ambrosini said.
In other business, the salary board voted to create a position for a business manager at the county’s prison.
The position, which will be posted, is salaried at $32,063 and includes accounting and budget-related responsibilities at the lockup.
It also includes ensuring that inmate medical co-pays are collected.
Zapotosky, Ambrosini and Lally voted to create the position, but Zimmerlink dissented. Instead, she said, the county should have the National Institute of Corrections conduct a free workup of the prison to determine how things would run more smoothly there.
Then, Zimmerlink said, they may be able to go without the new, unfunded position.
“To wait 30 days on this could be beneficial,” she said, asking the other board members to delay. “I think that would be a wise decision on our part.”
Lally suggested doing both, in tandem, noting that his office has spent between $12,000 and $13,000 since 2010 conducting audits on the prison that come back with negative findings.
“I’ve been putting my heart and soul into this since 2010. … I don’t think it can wait,” Lally said. “Waiting is a further delay in the process, in my mind.”
Zapotosky and Ambrosini both agreed that having the survey done was a good idea, but agreed with Lally that they should move on creating the business manager’s position.
In another matter, the salary board unanimously voted for a motion brought by President Judge Gerald R. Solomon to give all non-union court personnel a 3 percent raise retroactive to Jan. 1. The non-union court employees received a 2 percent raise, but Solomon said that there were funding issues with grant positions in the county’s juvenile probation office that also would likely occur in the adult probation office.
The board agreed to raise the salary for non-union employees in those departments, and Solomon said he would pay from the court’s budget to give all non-union court workers a 3 percent raise.