[StBernard] Oops: St. Bernard Parish erred on employee numbers

[Westley Annis]

Oops: St. Bernard Parish erred on employee numbers

Published: Thursday, June 21, 2012, 6:51 PM     Updated: Thursday, June 21,
2012, 6:54 PM

 By Benjamin Alexander-Bloch, The Times-Picayune 

St. Bernard Parish Chief Administrative Officer Jerry Graves said Thursday
that he made a mistake in the pre-Hurricane Katrina parish employee count he
provided in response to a Times-Picayune public records act request earlier
this month. Graves said the parish Department of Human Resources failed to
confirm the employee numbers with the pre-Katrina payroll records.

As a result of that erroneous parish data, The Times-Picayune on Sunday ran
a story stating that before Hurricane Katrina wasted St. Bernard Parish in
2005, the local government employed about 255 people who provided public
services for a population of about 65,000. Today, the parish has a smaller,
but climbing, population of about 40,000, and 458 employees.

Graves said that the actual pre-Katrina employee figure is 528. That means
that instead of an 80 percent increase, the staff actually is 13 percent
smaller than before Katrina.

"We had used the payroll to support the numbers for every other year, but
for some reason they didn't do that for the pre-Katrina numbers," Graves
said. "Yesterday, I was furious about it. It was just an oversight in the HR
department and it is what it is."

On Tuesday, former St. Bernard Parish President Charlie Ponstein confronted
Graves during a St. Bernard Parish Council meeting about the reported count.
He spouted off the employee numbers he recalled from his two-term tenure
that ended in early 2004.

On Thursday at 11 a.m., Graves sent an email to a Times-Picayune reporter
stating, "Yesterday we confirmed that the pre-Katrina data we provided had
not been vetted by the payroll office and was therefore inaccurate."

At 12:45 p.m., Graves forwarded the same email to the Parish Council and
Parish President Dave Peralta. "It is important that you guys know about
this situation. ... This is obviously my fault and I apologize," Graves
wrote to that forwarded email's recipients.

After learning of the mix-up, some Parish Council members and citizens
expressed confusion at how the mistake could have occurred.

Graves said, "We don't really care one way or another what the correct
numbers are, we just want them and that's why we have done what we have done
the last couple of days to get them right."

Graves reiterated, as reported in the Sunday story, that the reason for the
large current employee number, despite the downsized population, is that
recovery efforts in the parish require a significant number of employees.