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Ad Hoc Panel Analyzes DeMarco's Facilities Management Practices, Ideas

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Ad Hoc Panel Analyzes DeMarco’s Facilities Management Practices, Ideas

By John Voket

(This is the third part of an series on Newtown’s ad hoc committee exploring the possible merger of municipal and school facilities and grounds management.)

The council ad hoc committee looking into possibly merging town and school facilities management sat down this week with Maria DeMarco, who is charged with managing Newtown’s only public facility requiring such services. Ms DeMarco has been managing Fairfield Hills and various projects related to municipal comings and goings locally, since before the town took over ownership of the sprawling former state hospital and campus.

Her company, Hartford-based DeMarco Management Corp, will add management of the new municipal offices to the list of the dozens of state, federal, educational, and private buildings her company currently handles.

While the meeting spent some time questioning and hearing about the history of Ms DeMarco’s work in Newtown, the remainder of the meeting was spent hearing ideas about how the town could improve the economy and efficiency of facilities management of the multimillion-dollar resource that eventually will provide visitors a mixture of municipal, commercial, and recreational uses.

Ms DeMarco’s ideas, along with input from Fairfield Hills Authority Chair Robert Geckle, will be added to the volumes of information council volunteers on the ad hoc committee have already gathered since being appointed to their task last winter. These Legislative Council members will eventually recommend whether merging town municipal and school facilities management makes sense for Newtown.

The volunteer panel appears to be drawing closer to concluding a series of interviews of local officials and employees, who might eventually be supporting such a department if the proposal put forth by Councilman Daniel Amaral comes to fruition. Ultimately, by statute however, the school district cannot be mandated into such a merger locally unless the Board of Education agrees to participate.

The ad hoc committee includes Mr Amaral, Councilwoman Jan Lee Brookes, and Councilwoman Patricia Llodra, who recently declared her candidacy for first selectman. It was announced at this meeting that Councilman John Torok — the school district’s former business manager — had resigned from both the committee and his council post because of a recent relocation to neighboring Southbury.

Mr Amaral had been calling for a committee to be formed to explore the possible taxpayer savings and operational advantages of such a merger since late last year. He told The Bee on several occasions that he and his constituents observed town and school workers in situations where they appeared to either be idling on work sites, or situations where subcontractors were hired to perform work that might instead be completed by town workers at a savings.

Mr Amaral also questioned publicly why certain practices, especially concerning winter chores like plowing, and warm weather grounds and facility maintenance, were being performed by a combination of school, town Highway Department, and Parks and Recreation workers using various departmental vehicles and equipment.

To date, the committee has met with town representatives including Public Works Director Fred Hurley, Schools Facilities Manager Gino Faiella, Parks and Recreation staff and commissioners, and Scott Sharlow, Newtown’s information technology and geographic information systems manager.

Choice Of Vendors

Relevant information forthcoming from Ms DeMarco came early-on during the June 15 meeting when the council learned that because of her long and strong ties to state management jobs, she can provide Newtown with bids and pricing for goods and services from either state-approved or private vendors.

Ms Llodra said that the committee had been hearing that state-approved vendors do not always provide the most economical pricing. Ms DeMarco concurred, saying that she recently saw the best prices for hybrid Toyota fleet vehicles through the state’s purchasing vendor, while the best price on a pickup truck that was recently acquired by the town came through a local vendor, following an inquiry by the public works director.

On several occasions during the interview, Ms DeMarco classified her company’s work at Fairfield Hills as “atypical,” because she was concurrently working with the nonpolicy-making Fairfield Hills Authority, as well as directly through town officials on the municipal office project.

Ms DeMarco also reminded the ad hoc committee members that she helped coordinate and execute the move of municipal offices from Fairfield Hills to temporary leased space on Peck’s Lane. She was also involved in the acquisition and transformation of the former air conditioning plant on the campus into a high tech emergency management operations center.

During questioning about her compensation, and why the town might be better off handling some of the administrative work and vendor/service hiring and firing in-house, Ms DeMarco said she was providing all the services requested of her under the current negotiated rate, and that she handled all vendor contracting as a pass-through without applying any additional rates or surcharges for the service.

The panel learned that despite the fact that Newtown was in its initial stages of launching technology that would eventually help track and fix costs and savings to collaborative multi-department projects, Ms DeMarco had years of experience working with numerous similar software systems at government and private facilities.

Referring to the anecdotal perception of cost savings when school trades professionals, parks workers, and highway department staffers collaborate on large and small town projects, Ms Llodra said regrettably, “evidence on paper is scant,” and is not sufficient to respond to critics, and those like Mr Amaral who have legitimate concerns when they witness what appear to be redundancies, or town workers idling on project sites.

‘Extension Of Staff’

Moving forward as she begins handling town office relocations, Ms DeMarco encouraged the council officials to see her as an “extension of your staff.”

“Some departments already see us that way, and some don’t,” she said.

LeReine Frampton, a nonvoting citizen representative on the ad hoc panel, said that “getting the truth out” about the benefits of collaboration would not only help to minimize criticism of the system, but would go far toward ending what she described as escalating divisiveness in the community.

Speaking to the issue of having Ms DeMarco handle all the vendor hiring, and firing when necessary, Mr Geckle estimated that it would cost the town in excess of $75,000 to hire and provide benefits for a full-time facilities administrator versus keeping the present system, which costs taxpayers about $40,000 annually.

In her capacity, Ms DeMarco said she would like to be brought to the table along with other town department heads, especially since she will be so involved with the centralization and relocation of town and school offices to Bridgeport Hall this fall.

“I’m already starting to get a lot of calls from department heads,” she said. “I really need to start participating in staff meetings.”

As further anticipated commercial development ramps up at Fairfield Hills, Mr Geckle suggested Ms DeMarco’s experience and abilities will become more valuable to the town. But he nonetheless suggested the committee examine the costs and duties of similar “strategic sourcing and facilities management” professionals working in other state municipalities and beyond.

“A facilities manager can do things faster by not getting bogged down in municipal [bureaucracy]; they can hire or fire at will when there’s a need; and they don’t have to adhere to the same prevailing wage stipulations as the town would” when handling municipal projects on behalf of the town, Mr Geckle said.

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