Many public employees cannot work from home. Towns are searching for new options. – NJ.com

Countless businesses across New Jersey have been deemed non-essential amid the coronavirus outbreak and ordered either to close or have their employees work from home. But for some municipalities, doing the people’s business remotely isn’t so simple.

“We have a closed computer system, so people cannot work from home,” said Allan Roth, the City of Linden’s labor lawyer, noting that closed systems cannot be hacked from outside and thus provide a high level of security for the taxpayer information and other sensitive data. “The mayor and administration made a determination that we were going to be up and running full-time, and everyone needs to be in.”

So in Linden, a Union County city of about 40,000 people across the Arthur Kill from Staten Island, Roth said officials are trying to practice social distancing by dividing most of the city’s 350 non-uniformed municipal employees into two teams that work alternating five-days-on, five-days-off schedules, meaning City Hall is only about half-staffed.

And even though employees scheduled to be “off” cannot log into the city’s operating system and access files or applications to work on at home, their work phone numbers have been forwarded, and the employees are expected to take calls from the public and their bosses, and to report to work in person when necessary.

“It’s more than on-call, but it’s less than beck-and-call,” said Roth.

Municipal government is just one slice of life that’s been upended by the coronavirus, which has closed all schools and most retail businesses, sent the economy tailspinning, and killed thousands worldwide, including 81 New Jerseyans as of Thursday.

Roth said employees who need to stay home during the emergency — for example, to care for children whose schools have been closed — can do so as paid time off and then unpaid leave. He said additional cleaning and sanitizing of City Hall would be done by a custodian who would normally take care of the local recreation center, which has been closed to the public.

Teamsters Local 125 President Tony Petillo, whose union represents Linden’s public employees and about 1,000 others in northern New Jersey, refrained from criticizing the city for requiring that employees show up for work. Rather, Petillo said closed networks were common among municipal governments due in part to the security they’ve offered.

“Believe it or not, it’s also common in my office,” Petillo said of the local’s Wayne location, where a pair of administrative assistants now alternate shifts.

There are some services that municipal employees simply cannot provide from home, including police and fire protection, trash and recycling collection, code enforcement, and others. And those workers have continued to show up for work throughout the virus emergency, whatever their risk of exposure may be.

But for the kinds of government work that can be done remotely, Petillo said it seemed inevitable that working form home would at least become an option.

“I don’t see why it wouldn’t be,” Petillo said. “It’s going to be a changing workplace. It’s going to be a challenge for municipalities to determine how they do business. We are in uncharted waters.”

Irvington, on the Newark border in Essex County, has been making the transition to a more mobile workforce before and after the COVID-19 outbreak, a city spokeswoman said.

“Even before this emergency, we’ve been trying to do redundancy,” said Connie Jackson, a spokesperson for Mayor Tony Vauss.

Jackson said some employees had already been given laptops to use at home before the outbreak, while others have received them since then. Citing one example of newly adopted mobile technology, Jackson said the township has deployed Edmunds GovTech financial software, which lets employees work not just from their home, but on their phone.

“We’re all adapting as best we can, so we’re going to have to be very creative,” Jackson said. Then again, Jackson added, “Some of our services are not happening.”

In Seaside Heights, Borough Administrator Christopher Vaz said he had just installed Splashtop remote access software on computers at Borough Hall, allowing employees to recreate their workplace computer desktops at home, while guarding against hacking with encryption, verification and other cyber security measures.

“I literally logged into my desktop,” from home, Vaz said Thursday evening. “I’m controlling everything on my desktop, even though nothing is happening on my desktop in Borough Hall.”

Back in Linden, Mayor Derek Armstead has remained a physical presence along with the other public servants at City Hall, where on Friday, March 20, Armstead invoked the power vested in him to perform three marriage ceremonies, before the governor turned the screws still tighter on the virus with restrictions that included a ban on nuptials.

Each ceremony had fewer than a dozen guests, who had plenty of room to spread out in the spacious council chamber, Armstead said, and only the brides and grooms got close.

“I kept a good distance,” he added.

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Steve Strunsky may be reached at sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @SteveStrunsky. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tips