The County Council’s subcommittee that reviewed the Waggoner, Irwin and Scheele (WIS) Job Classification and Compensation Study made a recommendation to the full council Monday morning.
Council members Jon VanVactor, Penny Lukenbill and Heath Thornton along with County Auditor Julie Fox and HR Tori Stull have been reviewing the report from WIS for months and were ready to make recommendations on the job descriptions only. They noted that the job descriptions are a living document that is always changing. Lukenbill said, “They are as accurate as we can have them at this moment in time.”
The first recommendation was to make the county’s first deputies non-exempt hourly employees who can earn overtime.
Next the committee recommended keeping the Public Health Nurse, WIC Coordinator, Sheriff’s Captain, Chief Jailer and Communication Supervisor just as they have been, classified as exempt, but they would be treated as non-exempt hourly employees who can be paid for overtime or have comp time.
The Veteran Service Officer has always been classified as exempt but WIS recommended and so did the committee making the position non-exempt and available for overtime pay.
The committee made a recommendation for the three courts where the job descriptions appeared to be the same but with different names to standardize them. In all three courts there will be a Court Administrator, a Court Reporter, a Bailiff and a Law Clerk. In Superior Court II they would also have an Administrative Assistant, Civil Administrative Clerk and a Criminal Administrative Clerk along with Security Officer.
The committee said with this recommendation they were trying to accomplish was having the Salary Ordinance, Job Descriptions and Budget all have the same verbiage throughout.
In the Clerk’s Office there was another recommendation. While the clerk has illuminated the job description for the support deputy but there are two employees who currently hold that position in the clerk’s office. The clerk wants to make them all deputy clerks but VanVator said the difficulty is that they are paid $1.21 a hour more that the deputy clerks. The committee recommended keeping the current job descriptions for the support deputy and the deputy clerks without the WIS updates until the wages can be looked at. The motion was to retain the current job descriptions for these two positions.
Vanvactor said they are still looking at having job descriptions for Lake Enforcement seasonal deputies, in the Assessor’s office the Personal Property Data Collection seasonal positions, Adult Probation Administrative fund is still need a job description for a part-time intern and in the Health Department they still need a job description for the Health Officer and Sanitary Assistant and the Health Education part-time position. The county’s HR director is working to gather these job descriptions.
VanVactor said the committee hasn’t looked at any type of wages at this point. These recommendation, that were all unanimously approved individually were just trying to make the job descriptions match the titles in the budget and salary ordinance.
The Council also motioned to adopt the job descriptions by ordinance as presented by the committee.
