The Public Employees Relations Board is back in business. After its chairman, Aubrey Lee, announced earlier this week that the board had ceased operation due to lack of funding, Gov. Charles W. Turnbull directed Friday that funds be released.
Turnbull said he met Friday with his fiscal advisors and directed Ira Mills, director of the Office of Management and Budget, to release monies from the Union Arbitration Funds, PERB's funding source.
Mills said his office would release the full allotment for Fiscal Year 2000, and for the first quarter of FY 2001.
"We're very pleased with that," said Lee. "Now we can stay on the ball."
The agency had never received the fourth quarter allotment for FY2000, Lee said, and "when we do receive an allotment, it is already spent." He said vendor payments and rent consistently fall behind.
The staff's salaries were always "timely," he said, but everything else suffered. There was no money for office supplies, stamps and paper, Lee said, or for inter-island transportation. The nature of the board's business, he explained, requires frequent travel between St. Thomas and St. Croix.
And it requires paper. Lee said the board uses "reams of paper" in its work. "Cases are heard, dismissed, or sent for findings of fact, and then the board meets with the parties to hear testimony and cross-questioning," he said. "That's a lot of paper going back and forth."
The board met Wednesday, Lee said, and addressed about 30 cases, but not on the hearing level.
"Frankly, we know monies are taken from one fund to the other to meet various obligations, and that could have happened in our case," he said. "We know quite well the administration's fiscal situation, and we don't feel we were singled out, but maybe a low priority."
"We receive calls daily from persons with cases, and sometimes they're upset with us," he said.
PERB has come before the Legislature for financial help, Lee said, and it has helped to the extent it could, but the source of funding has to be the Office of Management and Budget.
Lee said he would worry about future funding in the future. "Right now, we're just happy to be able to operate."
