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Consultant recommends concise job descriptions; dispatchers ask to restore 'records clerk' duty
Summary
David Brown & Associates told Grant County to keep job descriptions focused on essential duties (about 10 items), not exhaustive task lists. Public safety staff urged restoring 'records clerk' to telecommunicator roles to avoid hiring a separate position.
At a DDA work session, Mark Goldberg of David Brown & Associates explained the firm's approach to creating job descriptions: use employee-filled Position Analysis Questionnaires (PAQs) to identify essential duties, prefer concise descriptions (two to three pages) and list roughly 8–10 essential duties rather than exhaustive task lists.
"The idea is not that you list every single task ... but you hit here are the major types of duties," Goldberg said, recommending that most job descriptions include duties that take more than about 5% of annual time.
Several public-safety employees and commissioners disagreed with how one public-safety telecommunicator position was drafted. Multiple speakers said the job description removed records-clerk responsibilities from dispatcher roles. "All of our nonlicensed employees are all records clerk," a dispatcher said, arguing dispatchers currently perform records management and that removing it would require creating a separate records position.
Goldberg responded that the PAQs included many items and that transferring every line would make job descriptions cumbersome; he said adding the specific records duties shown in the PAQ would not change the job grade because grade depends on level of responsibility and complexity, not a longer task list.
The board did not change grades at the meeting; members asked staff and the sheriff's office to identify specific essential duties to restore where needed, and they tabled additional action on the DDA package until follow-up with labor representatives and staff input.
Next steps: the sheriff's office and staff will provide recommended essential-duty bullet points for inclusion, and the personnel committee will decide whether to follow the consultant's approach or make targeted changes.
