five-year financial management plan<\/a>, remains a priority focus for county officials who often complimented Betti and prison administrators over the past year for success in that area.<\/p>\nAsked in October about the trend of reduced overtime spending, Betti partly attributed it to \u201cmaintaining as full of a complement as we can of full-time employees\u201d and to a drop in \u201cFMLA usage\u201d \u2014 leave taken under the Family and Medical Leave Act, including intermittent FMLA where leave is taken in smaller increments \u2014 by corrections officers.<\/p>\n
Officials have also attributed some of the success to improved shift planning and efforts to minimize staff vacancies.<\/p>\n
The 2026 county budget Commissioners Thom Welby, Bill Gaughan and Chris Chermak unanimously approved in December includes a $1.85 million line item for prison overtime this year.<\/p>\n
Terminations<\/p>\n
Last week\u2019s prison board meeting also featured an executive session, after which the board voted unanimously to terminate two prison employees whom officials didn\u2019t publicly identify.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are seeking to get board approval on the topic of the two terminations that we say are for just cause of those individuals that we spoke of,\u201d Betti told the board after the executive session and prior to the vote.<\/p>\n
What jobs the two individuals held at the prison and what led to their firings was not immediately clear. Betti did not immediately respond to an emailed request for additional information.<\/p>\n
Equipment<\/p>\n
Before the executive session, Betti also discussed with the board the potential use of inmate canteen funds, money generated from commissary sales at the prison, to purchase a new dishwasher and dental equipment for the jail.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe do need one,\u201d the warden said of the dishwasher, noting the prison uses Styrofoam trays when its dishwasher isn\u2019t working. \u201cWe spent $42,000 last year between repairs and Styrofoam trays for every time that it went down. That\u2019s almost half the price of a brand new dishwasher, which would be about ($100,000).\u201d<\/p>\n
Officials also seek approval to eventually use canteen funds to buy what Betti described as a \u201cdigital x-ray machine\u201d for the prison\u2019s on-site dental office, part of the jail\u2019s medical department. Betti, who said such a purchase will likely cost $10,000-$15,000, noted a dentist comes to the prison every Tuesday to do dental work for inmates.<\/p>\n
The board tabled a vote on the dishwasher purchase and didn\u2019t take any formal action on the potential purchase of the x-ray machine.<\/p>\n
Reorganization<\/p>\n
The board opened last week\u2019s meeting by reorganizing for 2026, with members retaining county Judge Michael Barrasse as board chairman and Sheriff Mark McAndrew as vice chairman.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re also maintaining the same meeting schedule in 2026, with monthly meetings happening the third Wednesday of each month at 12:30 p.m.<\/p>\n
While most prison board meetings are held in the fifth-floor conference room of the county government center in downtown Scranton, the board will meet quarterly at the jail on North Washington Avenue in the city. Those meetings are scheduled for March 18, June 17, Sept. 16 and Dec. 16.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Lackawanna County Prison finished 2025 almost $950,000 under its overtime budget for the year after exceeding its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":98167,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[201,182,139,28,178,180,179],"class_list":["post-98166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-scranton","tag-lackawanna-county","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-pennsylvania","tag-scranton","tag-scranton-headlines","tag-scranton-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98166\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}