County board approves Human Services overtime pay

By RICHARD JENKINS

[email protected]

Hurley — The Iron County Board of Supervisors recognized the extra hours the county’s Department of Human Services staff has been putting in the past year, voting 9-3 Tuesday to compensate three employees for additional time.

The board approved paying Human Services Director Cally Kilger, Financial Manager Diane Schmidtke and Program Manager Becky Rein a total of $75,649 for the roughly 1,863 hours beyond normal work hours the three worked in 2017.

Board members Ken Saari, Scott Erickson and Jay Aijala voted against the measure. Jim Kichak and Karl Krall were absent from the meeting.

“The overtime hours were, in part, caused by transferring transportation to human services and the integration of the aging unit. The fraud case (against Mary Tijan) and resulting forensic audit also took up a lot of their time,” board member Opal Roberts said during her committee report. “They are understaffed and we are working on that problem.”

Roberts said it could be difficult to find qualified staff to fill vacancies in the department as many require a masters degree and can’t be done by just anyone hired off the street.

During public comment, Kilger said the workload put on the department should be viewed in the same light as other extreme circumstances in the past that the county has authorized extra salaries for.

“Every way we look, everything has gotten more time consuming and complicated — reporting, program requirements, documentation. Workloads have increased exponentially without additional staff,” Kilger said. “We’ve done our best to be fiscally responsible, while at the same time watching placement costs explode.”

Schmidtke also addressed the board regarding the toll the extra hours have taken on employees and their families. She said they recognized salaried positions can require working more than 40 hours in a week, but the hours the employees were putting in were above and beyond what could be expected and were a common occurrence.

“Cally, Becky and I have no problem working a reasonable amount of overtime. Our goal is get to a schedule of 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. every day, with occasional extra hours for emergencies and big reports. That would result in about 250 hours of overtime per year,” Schmidtke said. “To put things into perspective, I had just short of 900 hours of overtime in 2017 — including working 28 of 31 days in March, to illustrate one month. I don’t feel that schedule is a fair expectation of any employee, salaried or hourly, compensated or not.”

She said all three also bring work home beyond the hours they turned in to the county.

The approval of paying the three came after an earlier motion to pay them $50,433 — which would be straight time rather than the overtime wage figure approved by the board — failed.

In other action:

—The board approved a temporary raise for Forestry Administrator Eric Peterson to recognize the extra work he is doing to oversee rebuilding of Saxon Harbor after it was destroyed in the July 2016 storm. Peterson’s salary was increased by 20 percent, or an extra $13,770, through 2019. The raise will be reevaluated at the end of 2019 to see where the reconstruction project is at and how much work remains.

—The board also approved paying for forestry office manager Tara Krall’s cell phone to compensate for the amount of county business she uses it for.

—The board approved purchasing a replacement software for the system used in the Human Services Department. The current software is being phased out by its company and will no longer be supported.

—The board hired two full-time dispatchers, Jerry Hitter and Brian Thomas, for the sheriff’s department.

—The board approved the University of Wisconsin Extension office’s annual report for 2017.