CARIBOU , Maine — Changes affecting city personnel are in the works regarding employee benefits like vacation days and sick days — but the extent of those changes has yet to be determined by the City Council.
As City Manager Austin Bleess explained before the March 10 public hearing, some of the larger policy changes include: redefining the hours of work for regular full-time and part-time employees to conform to the standards the federal government implemented as part of the Affordable Care Act, allowing for the vacancies to be filled internally through promotion rather than requiring all positions to be posted internally and externally concurrently, and moving from a Vacation and Sick Time Policy for new employees to a Paid Time Off policy.
At the public hearing, and again during the public input session of the March 24 City Council meeting, criticism was heard regarding the benefits offered to city employees.
Paul Camping was one of such dissenting voices, who thanked both the city manager and Assistant City Manager Tony Mazzucco for sitting down with him to talk about the potential Administration Ordinance amendments prior to the meeting and called the meetings “enlightening.”
However, Camping expressed that he was still “troubled with the generosity of our plans,” and said that Mayor Gary Aiken “said it better than it’s been said yet … you’ve seen some similar plans, but you’ve never seen anything better than the city offers,” Camping described. “That kind of sums up our frustration too — why do we have to be the best?”
“We don’t have to be the best because we can’t afford the best, and all we’re trying to do is keep the cost of government from growing year after year after year, because these benefits do have a direct effect on the bottom line and the mil rate and the amount of taxes we pay,” he added, explaining that all the times he’s addressed the council over the years, he’s asked that they “please try to stop the population decline in Caribou and keep it affordable for the citizens, and I think based on the questions I heard you pose tonight, your instincts are the same as mine,” he said. “It’s gotten out of control, and this is a golden opportunity for the personnel committee to go through all the little ins and outs of the intricacies of chapter two and make them reasonable.”
Included in the Administration Ordinance is the ability for full-time employees to accrue, or “bank” up to 960 hours of sick time and 400 hours of vacation time; sick time is accumulated at the rate of eight hours per month, and employees are also allowed to “bank” extra time those 960 sick days “to be used only when a long-term illness of the employee occurs, which can be documented by the employee’s physician.”
Both unused vacation time and unused sick time are allowed to be converted into pay when an employee either separates from the city or retires.
Totaling up those “banked” vacation hours and sick time for the city’s roughly 80 employees totals to nearly $600,000 — and that amount is largely unfunded.
Mayor Aiken explained to citizen Wilfred Martin during the March 24 meeting that the city has about $78,000 currently to cover accrued employee vacation and sick time.
Martin pushed Aiken to commit the council to having “a workshop with the citizens that are a little bit confused in this city and want to know what the rules are.” When Martin was reminded that about eight months ago, Aiken had offered to attend an organized meeting, Martin apologized and explained that he hadn’t had the time to organize such a gathering.
“I’m a little too old to come up here and argue with you people anyway, but I guess if I don’t do it, nobody’s going to do it, and it’s out of hand now, and it’s getting worse, and nobody seems to want to correct the situation,” Martin said.
The proposed changes to the Administration Ordinance, as discussed during the March 10 public hearing, would merge sick days with vacation days and create a more generic allocation of PTO (paid time off) to “halt the growth of the city’s substantial unfunded liability in sick and vacation pay out in exchange for greater flexibility with employee’s use of earned time,” the proposed change reads.
New city employees would accrue 136 hours of PTO yearly, and would only be allowed to accrue a total of 750 hours of PTO. New employees, however, would be required to use 80 hours of PTO every year.
The possible changes to the Administration Ordinance will be subject to further council review, but Councilor David Martin did point out a few things at the end of the meeting.
“That $600,000 liability … only a third of that falls under this policy, so there’s no magic bullet because we have unions to deal with,” he explained. “And I’d like to point out that we could have done nothing and no one would know a thing about the personnel policy — but we saw a problem, we started with the unions, we have made progress, and we’re working on it,” he emphasized. “We inherited this thing from some of the people who are sitting back there complaining — who were on the council at various times,” Martin added, making the joke that some of the issues faced by the current council are “older than …. Tony (Mazzucco),” he said, eliciting chuckles from the audience and his fellow councilors.
The next meeting of the Caribou City Council is slated for Monday, April 14 at 7 p.m. in the councilors chambers.
