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Trumbull officials to adopt sick-leave policy
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
Trumbull County commissioners plan to adopt a policy today relating to donation of sick-leave time by county employees to co-workers who have a serious health condition.
But as of Wednesday, it was unclear whether Engineer Randy Smith and Sheriff Tom Altiere will be allowed to have policies of their own.
The reason is that the Trumbull County Prosecutor’s office has advised commissioners it appears there can be only one county donated-sick-leave policy. The prosecutor’s office has offered to seek further clarification from the Ohio Attorney General.
The commissioners could exempt the sheriff’s office and engineer’s office from the policy, if those offices asked. But that could mean those two offices would be excluded from using donated sick time in their departments, said Bill Danso, an assistant prosecutor.
The sheriff’s office has its own donated-sick-leave policy, and corrections officer Bruce Gaugler has remained on sick leave for more than a year with the help of sick-leave donations, Lt. Pete Lucic said.
Many departments in the county have allowed workers to donate sick time to co-workers for more than a decade, but there’s never been a countywide written policy.
A recent controversy involving an employee at Smith’s office prompted a legal opinion from the prosecutor’s office saying the county should create a countywide policy, since the practice is fairly prevalent among county departments.
Smith said earlier this week he wrote a policy for his department that would be similar to the county policy except for two points.
First, management employees only would be allowed to donate to other management employees, and union employees only could donate to other union employees. Second, employees who have accumulated more than 2,000 sick hours would not be able to donate the hours above 2,000, Smith said.
Nancy Guerini, an employee in Smith’s office who has cancer, raised the issue last month, saying a co-worker was willing to donate some of his accumulated sick time to her.
Smith said donating sick time has never been allowed at the county engineer’s office and he has received legal advice telling him not to allow it until a written policy is in place.
Guerini’s sick time and unpaid time off ran out in July, and she started paying about $400 a month in August to keep her medical insurance.
Smith said he believes management and union employees should not donate to each other because of the potential for an ethical conflict, in which an employee might feel pressured by a supervisor to donate sick time.
The county engineer’s office has numerous employees who have accumulated more than 2,000 hours of sick time, Smith said. Employees can cash out a percentage of their sick hours when they retire, but nothing above 2,000 hours. Smith proposes that no employee in his department be allowed to donate any of the sick hours accumulated beyond 2,000 because they don’t have any monetary value to the employee who accrues them. If any employee donated them to someone else, however, they would cost the engineer’s office money when they were used by the ill co-worker, Smith said.