WORLD PROPERTY CHANNEL ®

I don't know about you, but I have always preached that property managers are the most important component of any successful commercial or rental-income enterprise.

Good property managers can boost the value of a property for the owner.  Bad property managers can tear down the property's value and reputation in a hurry.

So when I read last week that Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland and his advisors, because of a budget deficit, plan to replace 14 janitors and groundskeepers with inmates from the state penitentiary to daily clean the state's 147-year-old, 191,328-square-foot Capitol in Columbus, I got upset.

Now, bear in mind, this is no ordinary piece of real estate. The Ohio State Capitol is the second largest structure of its kind in the U.S.  The nation's Capitol in Washington, D.C., really part of a three-building complex, measures 588,000 square feet.

I wasn't the only one upset by the announcement. The Ohio Civil Service Employees Association, one of the largest unions in the U.S., has filed a grievance petition with the Governor to stop the plan.

Those janitors and goundskeepers, effectively the Ohio Capitol's property managers, earn $26,000 a year or $2,167 a month, not an extravagant sum by any stretch of the imagination.  The inmates would be paid $1,200 a year or $100 a month.

That got me really upset.

Why in the world would the state of Ohio pay the inmates such a princely amount when the families of the laid-off workers, at the same time, would be going to community food banks for handouts just to stay alive?

I asked myself, why would the Ohio pay the inmates anything at all?

Now, I know that inmates in other states do comparable property management chores and also get credited pennies per day on their prison account. 

But those inmates didn't take away 14 existing jobs.  They were ordered to work on projects where either no other non-inmate workers were initially  involved, or the jobs were created especially for the inmates.

However, here in Ohio, they are talking about paying inmates $3.33 per day - money, apparently, that can still be found somewhere in the state's depleted coffers.

Now I know the old argument about rehabilitating prisoners by training them in and out of the concrete walls so that they will be prepared to enter society when their time is up. 

And I'm all for that.

 But not at the expense of 14 hard-working individuals and their families who would suffer financial and emotional hardships when the head of the family loses his or her job to an inmate.

I eased up a little on this subject after reading what one Ohio wag wrote to an Internet posting of Ohio's plans. 

"They are always looking for skills prisoners can do and that (property management) seems to be a good idea," the wag wrote. "After all, the worst that could happen is a politician could be robbed, and isn't that what politicians do, anyway?"

And that's the way I see it --- for now.    

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