A proposal to defund the county’s libraries wasn’t the only surprise that one member of Alamance County’s governing board sprung on his colleagues during an otherwise mundane meeting earlier this week.
County commissioner Ed Priola also urged the rest of the board to amend the county’s personnel policy to prohibit staff members to use work time for training that’s unrelated to their job duties.
Priola told his fellow commissioners that his inspiration for this proposal was a recent “discovery” that 17 county employees have obtained “social justice training” from a group called the Alamance County Racial Equity Committee.
“They’ve received training on how to be a social justice ‘warrior,’” the commissioner added, although he later admitted that the word ‘warrior’ was his own twist on the actual course title. “[They learned] how to combat or fight systematic racism and other things like white supremacy…and I’m all in favor of training, but this is off the mission…You can take whatever training you want, but on your own time – and not on the taxpayer’s dollar.”
Priola went on to share some back-of-the-envelope calculations that suggested this training had cost the county about $22,000 in staff time. He added that some of the recipients of this training have included “senior” staff members, although he didn’t name any of these individuals or identify the departments they work for. Even so, John Paisley, Jr., the chairman of Alamance County’s commissioners, later suggested that some of these individuals work for the county’s library system.
Priola’s objection to this training isn’t the first time that the first-term Republican has taken a county department to task for its deference to left-of-center values like “social justice” or “equity.”
Earlier this year, Priola blasted the county’s family justice center for what its director had framed as lip service to these terms before he convinced his fellow commissioners to block a grant application that the center had planned to submit to the state. More recently, he chided the county’s library director for residual allusions to “social justice” and “equity” that had appeared on her department’s webpage even as she presented a new strategic plan that had been entirely scrubbed of these concepts.
On Monday, Priola tried to make a formal “motion” to have his proposed ban on “off mission” training enshrined in the county’s personnel policy. This attempt was short-circuited by the chairman, who observed that it isn’t the board’s policy to vote on items which aren’t on its meeting agendas. Paisley recommended, instead, that the commissioners instruct the county’s administrators to look into the suggested policy change and come back with a formal proposal.
Alamance County’s attorney Rik Stevens told the commissioners that he could whip up some language to address both the type of training that county staff members can receive as well as their use of staff time to obtain it. Priola replied that he wouldn’t bother to restrict training that doesn’t occur on the clock.
“I’m not interested in what people do in their own time,” he said. “That’s what freedom is all about. I’m interested in what they’re doing on our time.”
In the end, the commissioners instructed the county’s administrators to take Priola’s suggestion into account as they work on the county’s next annual budget.
