PERRY TOWNSHIP — The township will be eliminating one full-time position from the road department on the final Friday of this month.

Following a roughly 30-minute executive session for the discussion of personnel matters, the board of trustees approved a motion to reduce one full-time position from the road department effective March 28, with the affected employee to be notified in its meeting Monday. While the employee that would be affected was not initially specified, Ieropoli said Wednesday that it would be Road Supervisor Darreck Ferrell.

The decision came in a split vote of two to one, with trustee Tony Ieropoli offering the dissenting vote.

“I’m not in favor of discontinuing a position in the road department at this time, I wish there were other options we could take. I hope it doesn’t affect services to the residents,” said Ieropoli.

Trustee Jim Armeni noted that cutting the position had been considered previously and that he felt the township needed to balance the demands on manpower and personnel costs.

“We have three workers, and four years ago when Tony [Ieropoli] retired there was discussions at that time if we should replace the retiring road worker, we ended up making the decision to replace the position. Now it’s time to re-evaluate the manpower and the workload, I think,” said Armeni. “The cost of personnel and benefits are increasing. We do have the lowest road miles of all the townships in the county and while that didn’t weigh a lot on my thinking it is something to point out.”

Bailey said that while he hates “getting rid of any employee or making any cut that [trustees] don’t have to” their research indicated that doing so would save the township at least $75,000 annually in payroll and benefits without impacting the services residents receive. Bailey also said that with the township experiencing universal cost increases in recent years cuts were necessary to cover the township’s expenses with its largely static income without seeking additional funding from residents.

“Over the last few years, the township has experienced significant increases across all funds with the largest increases coming from health and property insurance, costs of equipment, and the overall costs to run the police department. Over this time the property tax revenue that the township receives has virtually remained flat,” said Bailey. “This has caused many of the funds to run flat or in the red this year, after analyzing all the funds with Fiscal Officer [John] Volio and reducing expenses as much as possible we realize that we need to reduce more expenses to be fiscally responsible with the moneys we have and be able to hold off on going to the public for additional moneys through a new or increased levy at this time.”

The board of trustees will meet next at 4 p.m. March 24.