Crawford County may soon adopt leave time plan

Could the fight over the donation of leave time in Crawford County be coming to an end? It appears so, according to Justice of the Peace Stanley Clark, who has met with attorney Chuck Baker, legal counsel to the Crawford County Quorum Court, to prepare a proposed ordinance to vote on at the Court's Sept. 16 meeting.

Clark said the previous ordinance, which he said could have passed the court, was pulled in order to improve the language to avoid putting the county in any sort of legal bind.

"They were just little things that Chuck feels have to be in this policy to protect the county," he said, later adding that it was Baker's comments on the previously proposed ordinance, as well as other members of the Court, that caused him to pull it on July 15.

At the time, Justice Mary Jan Blount said the tabling of Clark's ordinance was due to one issue – the definition of catastrophic illness.

"Basically, it was just tabled to go back to the personnel committee to further define catastrophic illness," she said. "Rather than approve it last night, it was sent back to re-address the whole ordinance and come back with a better-worded ordinance. That was the main thing."

Justice James Lane, who chairs the Court's personnel committee, said Baker found "gaping holes in what was presented."

Reached by e-mail, Baker referred all questions to Clark, including questions about changes to appear in the updated ordinance, saying, "I've met with Justice Clark and I am in the process of writing a proposal for the Quorum Court at his direction. It will be presented to them when completed, prior to the September meeting. …You will need to speak with Justice Clark for that information. This is his Ordinance."

Clark said two main issues will be addressed in the new ordinance – the process for requesting time from a leave bank and requiring that employees not donate every hour of vacation time available to them to the bank. The latter point was important to Clark, who said employees should have some banked time themselves should an unforeseen situation arise.

"We wanted to make sure they don't give away time they don't have," he said. "This makes sure they have to have 40 hours on the books after they donated (to the leave bank). That's one of the changes we put in there. That's to say let's say a guy only had eight hours of vacation on the books. You wouldn't want him to give that away and not have anything left."

Clark said the proposed ordinance would require employees seeking to use the leave time bank, established at the personnel committee's Aug. 1 meeting, to go through their immediate supervisor before the personnel committee would determine whether to grant up to 240 hours of leave time to an employee in need of the hours due to catastrophic illness affecting either themselves or a close family member, such as a child or spouse.

"Before, I had it set up with going to straight to the committee instead of to their boss," Clark said. "We changed it to start with the department head."

As part of the process, the ordinance is likely to address the concern of private medical information being released as a part of the process, Clark said. Typically, as recently demonstrated when the city of Fort Smith Board of Directors granted City Administrator Ray Gosack a 2.5% pay raise, meetings that deal with individual employees' performance or other private personnel matters can be held in executive session, protecting private information from public consumption.

Another portion of the ordinance Clark said is likely to be addressed in the upcoming proposal is allowing employees to only take a small number of hours, as needed, versus taking an entire 240 hours, Clark said.

"I think I put something in there that if 240 hours was the maximum someone could apply for at a given time, but if the doctors are saying you just need two weeks, they (the committee) can lower that number. They don't have to give that person the total number of hours," he said. "They can re-apply (at a later time) if the doctor says they need it."

And while this new proposed ordinance addresses many of the concerns from employees and the Quorum Court, Clark knows this is not the end of the changes that could happen to the proposed leave time donation bank.

"(The donated hours) would carry over from year to year. If people were to keep donating, (the bank could grow to thousands of hours). This is something else we talked about, if down the road something needs to be tweaked, or do they want to put a cap of 800 hours."

As of now, no cap will be included in the proposed ordinance, which Clark says will not come back for consideration should it fail to garner enough votes to pass at the September meeting of the Court.

"I believe that it will pass. I think the only controversy there will be is that some will probably want to include sick time instead of vacation time. But once that's hashed out and agreed to, I believe it will pass. If it doesn't pass, that will probably be it. I won't pursue it after that."