Changes to the Town of Taylor’s employee vacation and sick leave policy were approved Nov. 5.
“The policy we have in the employee manual has been put on hold, or not put into action for the last several years,” Town Manager Gus Lundberg advised the council.
When asked by Councilman Carl Cosper what the reason was for that, Lundberg responded, “Budget constraints.”
Lundberg was requesting approval of employee leave time policy changes.
“The town’s sick leave incentive policy is an incentive to entice employees not to abuse the time they use for sick time,” said Lundberg, “Basically, if they don’t use sick leave time, they have the opportunity to convert it to vacation time or receive a monetary payout for that time. That has not been happening for the last several years, but I would like to tonight bring that policy up. If we have a policy, we should be following it… if we need to make modifications to it, I would like that.”
Lundberg further explained that if an employee has more than 96 hours of sick leave he or she can convert up to 96 hours to vacation time. “So if you have four days sick time that you want to turn in, you can get two days vacation or monetary,” he said. “That’s the way the policy reads right now.”
The only change he proposed eliminating was “if they have a number of hours far beyond 96, and they took sick days during that year then they would not be able to turn it in. I would like to take that out and say, if an employee has enough hours to take advantage of that incentive, then we let them do that,” he said.
Vacation time is given depending on the years of service with the town; the number of vacation days increase as the employee’s number of years with the town increases. “The policy says that staff and employees can have up to 80 hours at the end of the calendar year, Dec. 31,” said Lundberg.
“They get vacation time so they can use it. There’s a limit; they can only carry over 80 hours, and department heads can accrue 120 hours,” he explained, noting that employees can earn comp time up to 40 hours, giving them a total of 120 hours of paid time off.
“The reason I want to make a change is so we don’t have a rush at the end of the year. My goal is to do something where we set a limit, but have that limit be a number of hours. Once they reach that point they just stop accruing any hours until they take some time off.”
“I like that,” said Councilman Jason Brubaker. “The purpose is to take care of things, refresh, come back invigorated.”
A motion to approve the employee leave time policy as Lundberg asked passed unanimously.
