Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Public Budget topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Budget reviews and staffing requests: council hears efficiency initiative and county attorney’s plea for prosecutors and paralegals
Summary
Council heard the county's Peak Performance Initiative promoting process efficiencies and reviewed departmental requests as part of the 2025 budget cycle; County Attorney Margaret Olsen asked for an additional prosecutor and paralegal to handle rising caseloads and discovery demands tied to body-camera evidence.
Summit County leaders used the Oct. 23 work session to outline a countywide “Peak Performance Initiative” intended to reduce process waste and to review department budget requests, while the county attorney made a separate request for two new positions in response to sharply rising caseloads.
Jenna (county staff) described the initiative as a structured effort to map routine processes, eliminate redundancies and require departments to demonstrate operational changes before seeking new funding. "It's about stewardship of taxpayer dollars," she said, stressing measurable outcomes and continuous improvement.
Planning Director Peter Barnes and other department leads showed examples of sticky-note process mapping, staffing reorganization and targeted efficiency gains that departments had already implemented. Barnes explained the planning department’s use of process maps to anticipate inspection workloads and to phase hiring in advance of an expected rise in complex permits.
During the budget discussion County Attorney Margaret Olsen told council the criminal division’s workload has grown substantially since pre-COVID years, citing an increase from about 29,000 calls for service in 2019 to a projected 40,000–44,000 in 2024. She said discovery demands, mandatory body-camera retention and new justification-hearing procedures are consuming significant staff time and that the office needs dedicated support to avoid trial delays. "This increase over pre-COVID is why we in the criminal division have been drowning," Olsen told the council. She asked the council to consider adding one prosecutor and one paralegal in the upcoming budget, with the paralegal focused on assembling discovery and video evidence so lawyers can spend time in court.
Council members asked clarifying questions about timing, estimated costs and whether the requested roles could be absorbed or phased in. Staff said detailed salary and budget estimates for charter positions would be presented at a follow-up meeting and that some efficiency savings had been identified elsewhere in departmental proposals.
Next steps: departments will return with performance-metric documentation tied to specific budget requests; the county manager and budget staff will include the requested prosecutor and paralegal positions in the next chart-of-positions review for council consideration.
