Alamance County’s commissioners have approved a new holiday pay policy that effectively enshrines the use of “banked” holiday pay in lieu of a higher hourly wage to compensate emergency workers who are scheduled to work on any of the county’s 12 recognized holidays.
The commissioners unanimously approved this new policy on Monday in order to settle any lingering confusion that the county’s former personnel director may have caused when she began issuing both banked holiday pay and “time-and-a-half” to the county’s shift workers without the approval of its governing board.
The commissioners had originally addressed these duplicative benefits in February – more than seven months after they were initiated by Cheryl Ray, the county’s then-H.R. director. These overpayments apparently began when Ray misconstrued an earlier board directive to pay out the banked holiday compensation that the county has traditionally accumulated on behalf of staff members who are assigned to work on the holidays. Ray had erroneously assumed that these payouts were to accompany a 50 percent wage increase for the time that these staff members actually put in during these organizational days off.
The commissioners, for their part, agreed to let the beneficiaries of Ray’s error hold on to the $470,000 that the county had spent on these unauthorized earnings. They nevertheless halted any further payments of time-and-a-half and instructed the county’s administrators to come up with some new procedures to avoid any future confusion over holiday pay.
Alamance County’s attorney Rik Stevens ultimately returned to the commissioners on Monday with some proposed revisions to the county’s personnel policy.
“We did a deep dive here to try to make it a better policy than we have seen in the past,” Stevens told the board’s members when he unveiled these proposals that morning. “We made changes to clarify the holidays we do have as a county…and which employees qualify for holiday-banked leave under the policy.”
Meanwhile, county manager Heidi York presented the commissioners with two ways to reward emergency workers whose shifts happen to coincide with the county’s 12 designated holidays.
Under one proposal, which York credited to county commissioner Ed Priola, the county would immediately issue an additional shift’s worth of pay to any emergency worker whose 12-hour shift falls on a holiday. The second option would continue to bank this holiday pay until it reaches 40 hours – at which point the county would cut a check at the end of the year for the excess.
According to the county’s administrators, both of these options would depart from the county’s previous policy, which simply accumulated holiday pay until a staff member retired or otherwise departed the county’s employ. In each case, the change would apply only to so-called emergency workers, who include sheriff’s deputies, paramedics, jailers, and 9-1-1 operations. Other employees are to receive “compensatory time off” if they happen to come in to the office on holidays.
Neither of the two options that York shared with the commissioners would’ve affected a staff member’s pay rate, which would remain at the usual level for both banked holiday wages and the time an employee actually spends on the clock during a holiday.
The county manager nevertheless acknowledged that each of these alternatives would add something to the county’s bottom line.
“Both of these proposed options do have a cost for implementation,” she told the commissioners, “and we would recommend that there not be a payout in the current fiscal year since employees have been compensated over and above what the board had adopted [in the county’s current budget].”
York went on to inform the commissioners that, going forward, it would cost the county an additional $1.1 million a year to cover the alternative she attributed to Priola. Meanwhile, she put a price tag of $773,000 on the second proposal, which would reserve payouts for staff members who’ve accumulated more than 40 hours in banked holiday pay.
Notwithstanding the credit he got for the first option, Priola told his fellow commissioners that he favored the financial repercussions of the second alternative.
“For me, it seems almost like a no brainer regardless of my inquiry during the last go around,” the commissioner said. “I’m for those savings right off the bat.”
“I’m for the savings,” agreed fellow commissioner Kelly Allen. “I also appreciate that they’re getting paid anything over the 40 hours.”
In the end, Priola and Allen joined the 4-to-0 vote in favor of the second alternative. Absent from Monday’s meeting, and hence left out of the vote count, was John Paisley, Jr., the chairman of Alamance County’s commissioners. According to the board’s vice chairman Steve Carter, who took over the chairman’s duties on Monday, Paisley was “indisposed” and “under the weather” that morning.
