Uniform costs stack up in city budget

College Park City Council members need to keep their scissors away from uniforms as they look for ways to make cuts to the city budget tomorrow, officials said.

Some city departments have requested thousands of dollars in uniforms for their employees - coming to as much as $536 per person - but that spending is necessary, the department heads said.

"Would you want to get a parking ticket from a guy in a T-shirt?" Public Services Director Bob Ryan said. "Parking officers and code officers wear distinguishable clothing so people know they're for real."

And what if the distinguishable clothing for someone to write parking tickets costs $500 a year?

"That kind of is what it is to keep them in clean uniforms that keep them respectful of our public," Ryan said.

But District 4 Councilwoman Mary Cook, who has committed herself to cutting from the budget, said she thought there was a way to get the uniforms for less.

The city rents the uniforms in a contract that includes laundry service, Ryan said. Parking officers must "lean across dirty cars" to tuck tickets under windshield wipers and get on the ground to chalk tires and boot wheels, he added.

But Cook said she doesn't "see a problem in people washing their own clothes," and that the city needs to reevaluate the contract to be more economical.

"We can give them their own uniforms" instead of renting them , she said.

Yet some city clothing requirements are deemed mandatory under a union contract, Director of Public Works Bob Stumpff said, such as an annual $170-per-employee allowance for steel-toed "safety shoes."

The cost of the uniforms for the department's sanitation employees may also seem steep at $364 per year per employee, Stumpff said, but that includes multiple sets of clothes per worker and free laundry. And there are some things that get on clothes that city employees "don't want in their home washing machines," he said.

Also, officials noted, they frequently don't spend all the clothing money the budget allocates them. Some money is set aside for unplanned replacements, they said.

In addition to trimming uniform costs, Cook said she is also looking for the council to reduce city spending on travel, membership dues to various organizations and subscriptions to municipal publications.

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