County officials have dropped a county highway department proposal to pay highway employees up front for on-call time.
The Bartholomew County commissioners asked county highway engineer Danny Hollander to drop his proposal to pay three hourly workers $60 a week to be on call nights and weekends whether or not they actually work, said Commissioner Larry Kleinhenz.
If those employees are called in to work, they would be paid time-and-a-half, which is overtime, Hollander told the council during their work session last week.
The proposal was approved by county personnel consultant R. Kent Irwin and the seven-member Bartholomew County Personnel and Administration committee, Hollander said.
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But Bartholomew County Council members were skeptical about the proposal at their work session March 4.
During the work session, council members raised questions that the personnel and administration committee did not consider, such as how an on-call policy at the highway department would affect overtime policies at the county jail and the Youth Services Center, Kleinhenz said.
“We asked Danny to pull (the proposal) because we knew, at that point, that what he was asking for wouldn’t fly,” Kleinhenz said. “In fact, it would create more problems that it would solve.”
County council members said they had also received a negative reaction from the public about the request.
“I got a lot of push-back on that,” council member Bill Lentz said Monday. “People seemed dead-set against it.”
“I also heard a lot of comments against it, once it came out in the newspaper,” Councilwoman Laura DeDomenic said.
When Hollander made the original proposal, he said he was mostly focused on the issues within his department, and not how it would impact other county departments.
“I understand where the commissioners and the council are coming from,” Hollander said Wednesday. “They have to look more at the bigger picture than I do.”
Nevertheless, Kleinhenz said he wants to be fair to the hourly highway department employees who don’t have large take-home salaries.
The most significant problem is highway employees who won’t answer an off-hours call from work because they don’t want to go out during extreme weather, Hollander said in an earlier interview.
One such event happened Saturday, when a large tree fell across a county road, Kleinhenz said. Although police quickly arrived to guide traffic, only one highway employee showed up — and it took him 90 minutes to arrive at the scene, the commissioner said.
Being on-call does restrict an employee’s personal life and the type of activities they choose to do on their own time, the commissioner said.
“If you are on-call, you can’t drink a beer, can’t leave the county, or do certain activities with your family,” Kleinhenz said.
Being on-call is especially tough on heavy sleepers awakened at 3 a.m. and asked to go work outside in extremely cold temperatures, Kleinhenz said. In addition, there have been instances when a single employee is called out on two or more separate emergencies during a single night, he said.
“I have been on call, and it’s not fun — no matter how much money you make,” Councilman Jorge Morales said.
Hollander and Kleinhenz said other potential ways to provide incentives for workers to come in during nights and weekends are being considered.
