Travis County Commissioners Court
Tuesday, July 26, 2011 (Agenda)
Item 11
Number 11, consider and take appropriate action on conversion of peace officers and corrections officers from 28-day pay cycle to a seven-day pay cycle effective October 26, 2011.
this item may be taken into executive session pursuant to consultation with attorney, maybe.
>> morning, Commissioners.
oh, no, it's afternoon.
diane blankenship.
I put this through, judge, after we spoke with you a couple of weeks ago.
looking at changing the fsla cycle on the peace officers from 28 days to seven days.
it was something that was discussed in the budget markup last year and it was budgeted for a September 1st start date.
in discussions over the summer there were some issues about whether first 1st was doable as a start date because of the beginning of the pay period.
but the 28 day cycle, the seven-day cycle and the pay periods when we pay people.
so looking that the we wanted to try to get something that coincide and we need -- we actually need to get a decision on that because there is some programming that needs to be done in hge if we were to make this change to convert the 28 day employees to seven-day employees.
but the first date that happens, all those coincide is October 16th.
we did bring this forward for the court to discuss whether or not that conversion is going to take place.
did you want to go ahead, travis?
>> sure, travis gatlin with the planning and budget office.
the budget office has been under the assumption that the peace officers within the Travis County sheriff's employees on the peace officers pay scale will move to this on September 1st, 2011.
they submitted a request for additional overtime funds to implement that change.
pbo reviewed that and has made a recommendation in the preliminary budget for an additional two million dollars to be set aside and reserved.
our best guess is it could be 1.3 to two million dollars in benefits.
it's possible that it could be a little bit less.
it's possible it could be more.
some of the factors such as how the office will implement it, if there's significant changes in the average daily population, other factors could change the cost figures.
in addition to that, I know there may be some desire on the Commissioners' court to add law enforcement staffing and corrections staffing and there was a request from the county jumg and also Commissioner Davis to provide some additional detail and verification on some of the f.t.e.
costing that was submitted by the sheriff's office.
so I put together how I came up with the recommendation for the two-million-dollar reserve along with some different various detailed summaries of different options for additional f.t.e.'s if you want to consider that.
that was submitted last Friday.
I'm happy to answer any questions you might have and I'll also note that the sheriff's office and some associated persons are here and they may also want to speak to you.
>> there was a real big issue, a real big deal looking at relief out there.
that's been around here quite some time.
and I know that some of this overtime money may be attributed to a lack of relief factor.
I really have not been able to determine, and it appears that some of the overtime money coming from the correctional end of things, I'm trying to determine what is the driving force on the use of overtime and if the court can maybe offset some of the overtime money that's being used if -- if staffing is the problem.
you know, folks take vacation, folks get ill, folks have different reasons for why they're -- just overtime.
folks end up working overtime.
but I do know that the relief factor is significant in this area.
and of course, would satisfying the f.t.e.'s of the relief factor actually help the cause in this particular situation?
and have anyone been able to track what -- what has been determined as far as the reason for the use of overtime in some of these particular scenarios?
has anybody been able to track that?
>> well, I know that I've spoken with the department office, I've spoken with hrmd.
I've spoken with the payroll staff and there's currently not a mechanism in place that will show that if employee a works one hour of overtime what's it attributed to.
if it's attributed to if that person, if it's a law enforcement officer and he's on the way to end his shift, but he sees something that he needs to take care of and he ends up working a few hours overtime to handle that situation, that's not marking the system.
but at the same time if an employee y takes off either sick time, vacation, training or whatever, that's also not tracked.
so there's not currently a mechanism I know of that we can determine for every hour of overtime what the cause was.
>> and I could tell you that there's a plethora of reasons for overtime, from fml to military leave to worker's comp to trying to flex out time in twait-day pay cycle.
there's a lot of different issues that we are using overtime.
>> well, an example, I think what I've been able to acquire is maybe something like about $55,000 per person, for an f.t.e., I believe, for a correction officer.
and of course, if you do the multiply effect on that, you get 30 folks, f.t.e.'s, and it actually ends up taking $1.6 million, which is something being requested here as far as some of the money that is added to the existing overtime situation.
I want to put my arms around a situation whereby a lot of the overtime money that's usually been used to facilitate and accommodate overtime if it can be maybe better served with some of the relief factor out cries that we've heard from the corrections and everyone else, not only that, we talk about safety issues and things of that nature.
and of course, you've mentioned, I think, the fact that there's various reasons for persons, military leave or a whole lot of other things, but at the end of the day someone -- especially the relief factor ratio that has been brought up, it appears that -- it just appears that some of the ways that you maybe can look at this is maybe to look at less f.t.e.'s as far as the cost of f.t.e.'s to maybe put a dent into that.
but then again I don't know.
I'm just throwing out something.
and of course, I asked why because there's no tracking mechanism really designed to determine exactly what is the biggest user of overtime.
and so I'm just looking at the big picture overall in all of this and I know that we're under a timeline whereby we need to do something by a certain length of time, but in -- but in the long run I just think that we need to really look at ways to address that relief factor, one way, shape, form or fashion.
and for many reasons.
and some of them are safety.
but again, looking at the overtime money, pool of money that's been set aside in the general fund, then looking at it and we get to this point of the junction in the game and we have to add on top of the money that may be available from general fund.
so there's just a lot of consideration, a lot of concern that I'm bringing up at this time.
>> well, judge, chief sylvester, Travis County sheriff's office.
judge and court, thank you for having us here today.
one of the issues you bring up, Commissioner database, on relief factor and how it impacts the overtime, the easiest analogy I can give you is what happened over fourth of July weekend when we had three people drown in Lake Travis and we had a homicide at Lake Travis.
and we only have a handful of detectives.
so all those folks are soaking up overtime.
and then a week later or within the week our suspect is in north dakota.
so we had to send the officers to north dakota to interview, come back and we have all these officers working overtime and draining the overtime budget because we don't have enough detectives to go around the country and tracking down murder suspects and taking care of business here.
and you bring up a good point about safety issues.
well, we've got safety issues in our jail, safety issues in patrol, but together the biggest safety issue that we don't even talk about is mental health safety.
the impact on our officers not having ample relief to take will time off.
all of our officers are involved in stressful situations, had to go through a stress management debrief.
we have to allocate time for people to go there to make sure that their mental health is priority one for our agency.
they need to be taken care of and decompress from a traumatic incident they're exposed to day in and day out.
that has a huge impact on our officers, which impacts sick leave, family medical, what it does to the household and kids because they can't get the amount of relief to take off when they need to.
and I want to talk about when gerald daugherty was here as Commissioner he talked about that the impact that our job has on our employees is not the normal time off to decompress.
they need probably four weeks per year to deexros with the trauma they see day in and day out, with the negativity they see in our society.
>> one of the things I would like to add, first of all I would like to say I was excited about having the opportunity this morning at 11:00 to speak to the court, but it reminds me of when I was playing college football we were playing this one team and we went out on the field and it started lightning.
they had to -- they had to call the game for a little bit.
and it took a little fire out of our team.
but I am here today still with a little fire in me and happy about the opportunity to finally address the issue that I've been trying to address for the last seven years is about staffing issues.
and about moving this agency to a level that it's never been.
and I think we have a great opportunity today to start off with looking at moving our officers to a seven-day pay cycle.
I watched the president and boehner talk last night and one of the things that I think is apropos to what we are doing today is they were talking about kicking that can down the road.
we've been kicking that can down the road for seven years since I've been here trying to get to the level of staffing that we need.
we have come every year.
and one of the individuals spoke about we're running out of runway.
this plane is about to go off the runway.
and I think that we have an opportunity today to land this plane, because we're not going to be here forever and a day.
we have an opportunity to make a difference at Travis County sheriff's office and give us the staffing needs that we've been asking for for seven years, since I've been here.
I think they've basketball asking for those staffing needs long before I got here.
but we have an opportunity to set a legacy to bring the manpower, and we can show you what kind of law enforcement agency that you could have.
I think you've got a top-notch law enforcement agency, corrections burro right now.
there's people that come from all over the country to look at what we're doing.
but we're not where we should be.
and one of the reasons we're not where we should be is because of staffing issues.
and I think today is a good start.
in moving us into the right direction by going ahead and taking action on what the commission voted on several months ago or maybe a year ago to move forward with this seven-day pay cycle.
I don't know how we got to this 28 day pay cycle.
that was long before my time.
but I know that major claire was part of that ainld like for her to give us a little history on how we got here and then I will open it up-- it's not up to me to open it up, it's up to you, judge Biscoe.
>> you're going fine
>> [ laughter ] I was about to switch places with you.
>> I would allow members of the association -- one of the things that I would like to say is that only one time before since I have been here that we've been in lock step.
we're in lock step in this particular issue.
we're on the same page.
and even though you may talk to an association, that association is speaking what this administration feels that should happen.
so we are all together.
when you hear one voice, you hear them all.
>> major claire.
>> thank you.
October 3rd of this year will be the 12 year anniversary of the implementation of the 28-day cycle for law enforcement officers in tcso.
yes, this was a deal.
both sides agreed to it as compensation and parity with other law enforcement agencies was on the daibl taibl.
now 12 years later the question is, is who is getting the deal?
during the last 12 years, supervisors in my bureau have learned to strategically flex time over two and three pay periods to keep our overtime down.
they've done a great job.
debbie rich can speak to how tedious and wasteful this is for her human resources payroll staff.
officers and their supervisors keep up with overtime, add agriculture few hours here and there together to possibly equate to one full day.
then they check the schedules to see what's the best time for the officer to take off based on the shift needs, not what's necessarily best or desired by the officer.
who is getting the deal?
not the officers.
officers who are required to work county mandated special assignments such as security for elections, frequently do not receive overtime pay with premium as do other county employees and other peace officers on the pop scale.
if an officer takes out of or has any reason not to make their world cup 60 hours in that 28 day cycle, according to county policy, premium policy is not triggered.
who is getting deal?
not the officers.
when we flex time for officers after they've worked extra hours due to late calls or major events, we are losing it on the other end frequently running short elsewhere, usually on the street.
for example, we've had seven deaths on daict Lake Travis this summer.
many of our dive team members are patrol team officers assigned to patrol shifts.
we take care to spread them out so a dive mission does not decimate the entire shift.
as much as we try, wre cannot completely control criminal activity or terrible accidents or other tragic decisions made by folks in Travis County.
officers stay late, work extra hours to resolve situations, write their reports, turn in evidence and then go home and apologize to their family for what they may have missed.
a child's birthday, an anniversary dinner or maybe a simple workout with a friend.
and then they get to flex those precious hours, flex them out not when they want to, but when we can allow it so we don't run short.
I know we signed up for this job.
it's just how it is in public service and law enforcement career, but really I have to ask, who is getting the deal?
not the officers and not the citizens of Travis County.
it's time to give tcso officers what every other county employee gets.
we've played these cards for 12 years.
it's time to redeal a new deck that's not stacked against tcso officers.
thank you for considering the real question of who is getting the deal.
thank you.
>> who is getting the deal?
the runway, the football game?
>> [ laughter ] kicking the can.
>> judge, Commissioners, sydney partner, Travis County sheriff's law enforcement president.
we're here today to let the court know that we stant united with the sheriff and his f.t.e.
plan and we also are asking the court to go ahead and vote to go to the 40 hour work week.
our men and women in law enforcement have struggled with the 28 day pay cycle for many years.
I think that as a benefit to the community clearly it has been a benefit to community by a cost savings by us, the men and women of law enforcement of being on that pay cycle.
and we're happy to do it, but the population model has changed, the census has come through, and I think it's time to go ahead and move past this and into the 40 hour work week.
and again, the sheriff's f.t.e.
package, the law enforcement association stands very firmly behind him on that package and we're here to support him all the way.
>> thank you, (indiscernible).
again, just to reiterate what sydney said.
we are standing behind the sheriff.
we have an issue with staff and I really believe that it's money that we're wasting on the cycle and needs to be converted to that relief effort.
I mean, unfortunately the reason why we spend so much money is because we don't have enough people to cover the vital areas that we actually need covered.
so for example, if you take a shift like mine right now, we have 19 people assigned to it.
I have a 17-slot roster, so I have to have 17 positions.
so I can only give two people off on vacation.
so once I do that, sick, training none of those things go hand in hand.
I will pay overtime.
I've had two cycle in a row we've spent as much as two and three people in a row everyday on overtime.
just to cover the safety aspect of the jail.
just to cofort posts.
so I think that relief act is really important.
on top of it I believe if an officer works and association members do too, that if you work and you earn that oversiem you shouldn't have to wait eight weeks for it.
you shouldn't have to wait until we go through three rotation and three cycle in order for you to get that money.
on top of it, if a holiday comes up and you worked the entire stretch, but you were off on the holiday, you don't get paid your premium because there's a holiday involved.
so we strongly urge you to go back to the 40 hour cycle.
>> well, I put it on the agenda because I thought we had committed a couple of years back that when we -- when the population reached one million we would go back to the seven-day pay period.
and so I think we ought to do it.
the problem, though, is that it will cost.
and we will spend one and a half million dollars in overtime this year and pbo is adding another two million to that.
there's three and a half million.
we are scheduled to have a budget hearing for the sheriff on August 15th is what will be recommended in just a few minutes here, but this is the kind of stand alone, do we go from 28 to the seven-day pay cycle or not.
and in my view we should do it because we promised to.
and when we were confronted with the legislation to change that, we decided not to participate because we had made a commitment.
sue my motion will be basically for us to go ahead and go from the 28 pay cycle to the seven-day pay cycle.
I didn't know we had been on it 12 years, but I do recall distinctly when we went to it.
and we actually went to it to save money or to generate a little extra money to spend elsewhere in the sheriff's office, we thought.
>> I second that motion, judge.
I would like to say this also.
I think that it's very serious and if you look -- I just heard the testimony from the last speaker there.
and if you look at the numbers and you see an example, a corrections officer having $55,000 a year annually, that's what they end up charging, that's an f.t.e., but of course, it just appears to me as the person just stated, with the relief factor in place, and have you the proper relief factor, the less opportunity you will have to deal with your overtime of money that's maybe set aside.
so I think we maybe need to look -- I know the budget cycle is coming up.
we're talking 1 point of million here and on top of that another two million dollars for some of the situations, but at the end of the day I think the cure to a lot of it is to provide a strong enough relief factor where overtime does not have to be used to accommodate some of the situations that they run into.
of course one of them is safety among other things.
so I second that motion, judge, again, but I still want to make sure this during the budget cycle we keep maybe that in mind also.
>> judge?
is it a part of your motion that this would be effective on October 16th, 2011?
>> yes.
>>
>> we were told by the auditor that that would be the first day that this could get done.
that's why I put the exact date in the agenda language.
so the motion is for us to make it effective at that point.
>> okay.
>> any more discussion on the motion?
>> I do want to make a comment.
I have looked at this real carefully and sometimes the right changes are a little painful, but I do believe this is the right thing to do.
it's needed, should move forward with it.
>> ditto.
>> any more discussion?
all those in favor, signify all in favor?that passes by unas vote.
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