Alamance County’s leaders put in some cognitive overtime this week as they tried to untangle a payroll snafu that has credited staff members who been assigned to work holidays this fiscal year with three and a half times the wages they were supposed to receive.
The county’s board of commissioners ultimately devoted the better part of an hour to correcting this remunerative mix-up when the county’s administrators brought it to their attention at the end of a seven-hour budget retreat on Monday.
When all was said and done, the board’s members decided to halt these erroneous holiday bonuses, which apparently grew out of some confusion over a much more modest concession that the commissioners had granted last spring to first responders who work fluctuating shifts. But the board also resolved not to dock anyone who had benefited from the gaffe, which is estimated to have cost the county $470,000 in additional payroll expenses through the end of the latest pay period.
The decision to eat this cost rather than claw it back from the staff seemed like the fairest way to proceed to commissioner Ed Priola.
“This is the policy that was promoted in an official way. We advertised it . . . and we should honor it.”
– County commissioner Ed Priola in deciding not to try to recoup the $470K overpayment from county workers
“This is the policy that was promoted in an official way,” Priola said before he made a motion in support of this option. “We advertised it . . . and we should honor it.”
Priola and his fellow commissioners arrived at this consensus after a 40-mintue debate over the best way to address the payroll misfire – which in turn followed a half-hour closed session about a presumably interrelated personnel matter.
The commissioners had gone behind closed doors on Monday at the behest of county attorney Rik Stevens, who announced that he needed to discuss an issue that touched on the “qualifications or fitness” of a particular staff member as well as a potential complaint about this unnamed individual’s job performance.
The commissioners made no further mention of this personnel-related matter when they emerged from their closed-door confab that afternoon. Even so, Alamance County’s manager Heidi York offered some hint of what had transpired with an off-handed announcement that the county no longer had a human resources director.
York later told The Alamance News that Cheryl Ray, who had been in charge of the county’s HR department, had tendered her resignation on Friday after spending a period of time on administrative leave. Originally hired by the county on April 9, 2018, Ray was promoted to personnel director on February 1, 2022 and was earning an annual salary of $124,109 when she resigned.
Just how Ray may have been mixed up in this matter was never made clear during the board’s public discussion on Monday. But one thing that was broached in the open was an account of how this mishap occurred.
According to the best surmises of the county’s administrators, the compounded overpayments arose from a misinterpretation of a policy change that the commissioners approved last year on behalf of paramedics, sheriff’s deputies, and other public safety employees whose jobs may require them to work on weekends and holidays.
Stevens reminded the commissioners that some of these hourly shift workers had felt slighted by the previous policy, which had parceled out their holiday pay in “comp time” rather than cash whenever they were scheduled to work on any of the county’s 12 designated holidays. In response, the commissioners authorized the HR department to pay out more than 13,400 of these banked holiday hours in the spring of 2024. They subsequently gave the county’s personnel director the go-ahead to continue cashing out these banked hours at regular intervals throughout the course of the year.
Stevens went on to recall that, at some point, the commissioners were also presented with a proposal to pay the county’s emergency workers time and a half for holiday work. The commissioners ultimately rejected this recommendation. Even so, this increased compensation somehow became jumbled together with the board-approved payouts to spawn a policy much more generous than anything the county’s leaders had contemplated.
This mutated provision, which eventually found its way into the county’s employee handbook, stated that anyone who had to work on a holiday would not only get paid at the regular rate for the time they actually spent on the clock but would also receive a bonus payment equal to time and a half. Then, as a added sweetener, these same staff members were to be credited with a full day’s worth of banked holiday pay – for a total haul that amounted to three and a half times their regular pay.
According to Stevens, these erroneous measures took effect when the current financial cycle began on July 1. By the time that the county’s top brass had discovered the goof, the personnel office had already issued payments for nine holidays – for a grand total of $411,000 in superfluous outlays. The county attorney added that, barring immediate action from the commissioners, that the personnel office was days away from cutting checks for another $59,000 in overpayments for staff members who had been called in to work on the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.
The county attorney went on to inform the commissioners that they have several ways to respond to this systematic mistake at the county’s HR department.
One option, which Stevens dubbed the “roll back” alternative, would revert to the old policy and force staff members to repay the time and a half they had been issued in error.
“That is the most punitive option we can take because it involves taking earnings back from their employees,” the county attorney added. “I do think there’s a fair argument we can make that we can take it back…I think it’s defensible. [But] I don’t want to have to defend it because I agree the employees are going to feel shorted.”
Stevens said that another approach would be to ratify the error as if it had been the plan all along. Under this scenario, staff members would hold onto their earnings and the HR department would continue to issue holiday pay at the increased rate – albeit with the blessing of the county’s governing board. Stevens conceded that he didn’t think this option would have much traction with the commissioners but still wanted them to be aware of its existence.
“Option three,” he continued, “is what I call the ‘clean break’ approach. It basically says what has happened has happened. But we won’t do that in the future.”
Stevens said that his clean break proposal would allow staff members to keep all of their unintentional earnings, including the excess wages for Martin Luther King’s Day, which would be reflected in their next monthly pay checks.
Stevens also held out a fourth, hybridized option – which suggested the claw back of “banked” holiday pay but not those funds that have already been pocketed by staff members.
In the end, the commissioners unanimous concurred with Priola’s contention that the county can’t, in all good conscience, demand money back that it had given staff members every impression was rightfully theirs.
The board consequently voted 5-to-0 to proceed with the county attorney’s “clean break” approach. Meanwhile, it agreed to revisit this issue at their next regularly-scheduled meeting in order to revise the personnel policy to reflect their actual intentions about holiday pay.
Read the newspaper’s editorial page opinion on the county government’s overpayment snafu:
