Board of Supervisors Decides Against Privatizing Airport Security
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
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Screeners at the Sacramento International Airport will continue to be union employees. The County Board of Supervisors decided against going with private security trained by the TSA.
A year ago, the board applied to have the Transportation Security Administration use and train private employees to work at the airport. Linda Cutler with the airport says, at that time, privatizing the work force with the TSA's Screening Partnership Program or SPP, would have provided more flexible employee scheduling. But, the scheduling issue has since been resolved, "The other thing is that the GAO -the Government Accounting Office- issued a report about three weeks ago indicating that they could not really identify some of the benefits to the SPP that they originally assumed their might be."
Cutler says current employees likely would not have been in
danger of losing their jobs, but the American Federation of
Government Employees would not have been able to represent
them.
Supervisor Phil Serna says there didn't seem to be a reason to
change from the status quo, ""There hasn't been to date any real
demonstration that there is an advantage and if there isn't an
advantage, why call into question the status of the folks who are
out there working today that have been working at Sacramento
International Airport for years now."
Sixteen airports nationwide have privatized security forces
under the TSA's Screening Partnership Program.