Moorcroft adjusts time off for employees

With Moorcroft Mayor Dick Claar back in town and taking his seat at the Monday night workshop and subsequent meeting, his mayor pro-tem and the rest of the governing body once again made up the council in full.

Town Attorney Pat Carpenter has been updating the town employee handbook, making policies therein more relevant and legible for council and staff; he is currently working on insurance and time off.

Considerable discussion was shared regarding staff time off, particularly sick time, vacation and Paid (or personal) Time Off (PTO). The body was able to create viable adjustments to these subjects.

“You can use a PTO structure that encompasses all three or we can use a hybrid structure where we have PTO and sick or we can keep it exactly the way it is,” Carpenter advised.

As the option of coalescing the three types of time off were examined, Councilman Dale Petersen shared his thoughts on the matter: “The thing I like about having those separate, sick leave you can require a doctor’s note after three days. If you use PTO, that would be really hard to do. I’m not in favor of lumping them all together; I think they should be in two different categories – personal leave if you want to go shopping in Gillette all day long versus doctor appointments.”

“To me,” opined Councilman Ben Glenn, “it doesn’t matter if you get a week of vacation and a week of sick – it’s not much difference, it’s two weeks of PTO.”

Public Works Director Cory Allison disagreed with this view, however, stating, “It does matter. If we lump them all together [and] somebody’s going for surgery, they’re not going to have the days that are for sick only.”

After listening to more back and forth, Councilman Austin Smith told his fellows of the changes recently made in his workplace.

“At True [Oil], we just did the same thing [and] went to straight PTO. It was so hard for us, as employees, to keep track of what we’ve used so they lumped it together,” he said.

This company no longer allows any “carry over” of time. “That was the one catch to the whole deal, we went to straight paid time off and it was ‘use it or it was gone’,” Smith said.

Vacation pays currently day for day while Sick Time and PTO pays only a third. As of the end of this year, PTO will only be paid off for 40 personal time hours and 80 of vacation.

To mitigate any issues staff with exorbitant amounts of time accrued may have with losing those hours of paid time off, Petersen suggested phasing allowing 80 hours of the accrued time to be paid this year instead of the maximum 40 that will be in place for 2022 at the job start anniversary.

“We’ll offer that extra to try to alleviate these hours over because of the [old] policy,” he said.

As the group attempted to rectify the possible loss of time as the new policy takes effect, Glenn admitted, “It isn’t going to be perfect for everybody.” The mayor agreed with this comment.

Under advice from Carpenter, department directors will inform all staff before year’s end.