BOC amends sick leave policy

The amendment, which takes effect Jan. 1, establishes a sick leave bank to which employees can donate a portion of their unused days.

Under the current policy, employees can directly donate their unused days to fellow employees. The amendment was proposed because some have said the current policy is abused by employees seeking sick days from other workers unnecessarily. But others said the current policy proves very helpful to employees who face a family or medical crisis.

Human resource director Donna Sisk recently met with county department heads, who said they favored keeping the current policy by a 10-4 margin.

And Sisk said department heads feel that employees don’t necessarily want to donate their unused sick time to a bank where they don’t know who uses it.

The amendment was revised slightly to call for sick leave requests or transfers to the “bank” be given first to respective department heads, who will then inform human resources.

Sisk pointed out that she could send out e-mails for donations of sick time when she received notification of a need by an employee.

County employees currently receive 12 vacation and 12 sick leave days per year and all of their own time must be exhausted before they can receive donations of sick leave.

District 1 commissioner Stanley Thomas said he feels sick day donations under the current system are sometimes being used as “personal days,” instead of for cases of real need.

“Sick days should be for sickness only,” Thomas said, pointing out that there are “no subs” for county government employees, such as there is in the school system.

“When you start looking at our jobs compared to other jobs throughout the county, this is a pretty good system…I just have a hard time with this ‘open system’ (of sick day donations),” Thomas said.

“There was a statement made that ‘we earned this, we can use it as we want to,’ but it is a benefit to employees by the county to be used as it’s supposed to be used,” District 2 commissioner John Pethel said.

“I look at it as a fringe benefit,” District 5 commissioner Bruce Scogin said, adding that another option would be to have no sick leave policy at all.
“That’d cut down on some of the bickering,” he said.

Scogin said later that he was joking about taking away sick time and that the amendment was not meant to be a reflection on county employees.

“We have good employees and this is to help protect this (sick leave) benefit,” he said.

Building inspection department head Eddie Pritchett told commissioners he didn’t have a problem with the changes, saying he thought they would simply add controls to prevent abuse.

PART TIME DEPUTY CLERK HIRED

In another matter Wednesday, the board also voted unanimously to hire Linda Cox as (part-time) deputy county clerk.

Cox will replace Spence, who resigned in May after she admitted to stealing money from senior center funds.