Solano County supervisors respond to grand jury criticism

By Melissa Murphy, The Reporter -

The Solano County grand jury didn't hold back its criticism in a report regarding the lack of performance evaluations at the county administration level.

Now, the Solano County Board of Supervisors is now responding to the grand jury's findings and recommendations.

Departments criticized for being out of compliance include the Registrar of Voters, Health and Social Services and the Sheriff's Office, all of which the grand jury said were lagging considerably. A random sample of personnel files found that employees in the registrar's office were waiting at least 46 months between evaluations, the report said. It was slightly more than 25 months in Health and Social Services and 21 months in the Sheriff's Office.

While the Registrar of Voters division disagrees with the finding, it is implementing a recommendation that all staff receive performance evaluations annually at the time of their employment anniversary.

Additionally, the Department of Human Resources agreed with the grand jury on its lack of performance evaluations. They agreed to include the evaluations with the managers' appraisals.

In an effort to implement corrective action and continuously improve the process, the Sheriff's Office is working with the Human Resources Department to "develop and implement a better tracking mechanism to ensure timely submission of annual performance evaluations," according to the board's response.

Also, the grand jury found that many individual personnel records were missing annual performance evaluations.

In the board's response, county officials said the County Administration Office has already implemented the grand jury's recommendation to ensure that all personnel evaluations comply with county policy and procedures and forwarded to the Department of Human Resources in a timely manner for inclusion in the individual files.

Additionally, an analysis is being done to determine if there are performance evaluations that still need to be submitted to the Department of Human Resources.

In the past, the Department of Human Resources didn't track performance evaluations and did not record performance evaluations into a centralized database because individual departments tracked the due dates for the employee's next performance evaluation.

That has since partially changed, according to the board's response.

The information system for Human Resources does include fields for recording when an employee's performance evaluation is next to be completed and when the last one was given.

"The Human Resources Department is working with all county departments to populate those fields so that departments can run their own monthly reports on upcoming and past-due performance evaluations," the response said.