A legislative panel on Tuesday signed off on the state Department of Human Services' proposal to hire a veteran U.S. Secret Service agent as its chief of security and compliance for $106,919 a year.
The action came after a department deputy director, Keesha Smith, acknowledged that the department has "a major gap" in the security for its county offices across the state and its staff.
The Joint Budget Committee's Personnel Subcommittee approved the request to pay Brian Marr, who has been the U.S. Secret Service special agent in charge at Little Rock since April 2005, at the maximum authorized salary for the department's job.
Marr, who is paid $124,000 a year in his current job, is an exceptionally well-qualified applicant because he has more than 25 years of work experience with the Secret Service, including serving on the presidential protective detail from February 1997-August 2001, said the state's personnel administrator, Kay Barnhill.
Afterward, Marr said he would retire from the federal government before he goes to work for the Department of Human Services. Marr will start his new job April 10, said department spokesman Amy Webb.
Barnhill said in a letter to the subcommittee that the Department of Human Services has undergone an internal reorganization and needs to restructure its security practices and procedures.
Marr will look at offices in each county, Smith said.
"We do not have any type of security measure at those facilities. We don't have private security. Staff are, in essence, responsible for whatever happens at those respective facilities," she told lawmakers.
The position "became critical for us" after two incidents, Smith said.
"We had an individual that just happened to be passing the office and she was having a manic episode and ended up pulling out a knife on her children and the children went into our building and two of our staff members ended up tackling that person. But they had no knowledge as to what to do. They just jumped into action, which was concerning for us," Smith said.
Webb said later the incident was in Independence County in October 2016.
Smith said a caseworker at the department's Children and Family Services Division "had a gun pulled on them when they went to go try to do a well check on a child." She also said that's happened many times.
Webb said later that that incident occurred in Poinsett County in January 2016.
Smith said Marr's first task is to look at physical security for county offices and the second task is look into personal security of the staff of the Children and Family Services and Adult Protective Services.
Sen. Joyce Elliott, D-Little Rock, asked if the department plans to provide some security with the caseworkers doing "the well check" and whether that would lead to the need to hire more employees.
"We don't at this present time anticipate that we are going to have to hire a lot of other additional individuals," Smith said. "Some of this is going to come through better partnerships with local law enforcement, which he [Marr] is going to help facilitate, and then some additional things that we have talked about for some time. We have talked about things like mace and ways in which staff can protect themselves that are non-lethal, and which roads we need to go down."
A Section on 03/08/2017