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Trumbull committee seeks overhaul of pay plan for coroner investigators
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
An overhaul is warranted for the payroll system for four investigators at the coroner’s office, say two members of the Citizen Budget Review Committee formed to advise the Trumbull County commissioners on financial matters.
John Talstein and Mike Bollas say the on-call system used to ensure someone answers the coroner’s phone 24/7 leaves open the possibility that investigators are doing little work for their $43,000 annual base salaries.
The base salary excludes fringe benefits such as retirement and cashed-out vacation and sick time that raise the total to about $61,000 per year.
The system requires investigators to log eight hours per week of physical work on coroner’s tasks and 32 hours of on-call tasks such as taking and making phone calls regarding deaths. They can do that from home or wherever they have access to a phone. They also are required to go to death scenes.
The coroner’s chief investigator acknowledges she and the three other investigators do not keep records of the amount of time they work while on-call or how often they go to death scenes – but insists that they earn their wages. All four are registered nurses.
The coroner’s office was one of several departments Talstein and Bollas volunteered to examine with an eye toward cost savings as the commissioners considered ways of balancing the county’s 2018 budget. Talstein is a retired industrial engineer, and Bollas is a retired former employee of the state auditor’s office. They visited the coroner, Dr. Humphrey Germaniuk, in the spring.
Talstein said Dr. Germaniuk didn’t seem to know a lot about how the investigators were paid. Shelley Mazanetz, his chief investigator, agrees.
“He basically lets us do our thing, and he signs payroll every week, but he didn’t realize how we did our hours,” she said. Mazanetz handles pay issues for the office.
Talstein and Bollas later examined the way coroner offices in other counties handle death investigations to find out other ways of managing that work.
MAHONING COUNTY
Mahoning County doesn’t require investigators to be registered nurses, although it does require a bachelor’s degree. They work a more traditional 40-hour schedule of office time, said Theresa Valek, chief coroner’s investigator for Mahoning County.
Each investigator works one week per month of on-call-time, for which they earn one hour of their hourly wage at time-and-a-half for each day they are on call.
That means the three lower-paid employees make $19.83 per day for their on-call status. They earn overtime for hours if they are called to death scenes or take long phone calls, Valek said.
Mahoning County investigators make an average base rate of $29,000 annually that rises to $33,111 annually because of additional on-call and overtime call-out pay.
Valek said she thinks having registered nurses as coroner’s investigators is helpful, but it’s not required.
As another comparison, the Warren Police Department has detectives who work overtime if there’s a major crime while off duty. Each detective is assigned a week of on-call duty at a time. They are not paid anything extra for being on call but earn overtime for hours worked when called out.
CAUSE FOR CONCERN
Talstein and Bollas put their concerns about the Trumbull coroner’s office in writing to Commissioner Mauro Cantalamessa, who told The Vindicator the report gives him “cause for concern.”
But multiple attempts to talk to Dr. Germaniuk over a week’s time proved unsuccessful, Cantalamessa said. Likewise, Dr. Germaniuk did not return phone calls from The Vindicator.
Dr. Germaniuk carried out more than 328 autopsies in 2016 while trying to find a second pathologist to ease his opiate-crisis-induced workload. The doctor, 63, was unable to find a pathologist.
He was the forensic pathologist for many years before he was elected coroner eight years ago. By working as forensic pathologist and coroner since his election, he is saving the county the coroner’s salary. In 2015, Dr. Germaniuk earned the highest award given by the Ohio State Coroners Association.
Mahoning County has no forensic pathologist since the death of Dr. Joseph Ohr in April. Dr. Ohr performed 126 autopies in 2016. Another nine were performed in Cuyahoga County, Valek said.
Valek says she thinks one reason the number of autopsies is so high in Trumbull is that Dr. Germaniuk does autopsies on all apparent overdose cases, and Mahoning County normally does not.
The budget this year for the Trumbull coroner’s office is $713,254. The Mahoning coroner’s budget this year is $860,212, according to Vindicator files.
NO DOCUMENTS
Talstein and Bollas say a big concern is that no documentation shows how much time Trumbull’s investigators worked during on-call hours.
Bollas wrote a separate letter to Cantalamessa, recommending that investigators receive a “stipend” for their on-call hours – as in Mahoning County – instead of it being part of their 40-hour work week. Under the current system, vacation, sick and comp time should be pro-rated to match only the documented time they carry out-coroner-related work, he said.
Mazanetz said she can’t estimate how many phone calls she handles or how many of those 32 hours of on-call time are spent on coroner-related business because it varies so much from shift to shift.
If she were to write down all of the phone calls she makes and receives while on call, “I would be spending all my time writing a log. In the course of 24 hours, I might get 24 calls,” Mazanetz said. On other days, she might get very few.
Mazanetz has been an investigator 18 years.
All 168 hours of every week have to be covered by one of four coroner’s investigators, she said. Each works two 24-hour periods per week, at least eight hours of which is hands-on work, such as tasks at the office or morgue.
On an investigator’s eight-hour weekday physically-present shift, she works eight hours in the office and 16 hours on call. If it’s a weekend shift, the eight hours in the office is not required, but she is on call 24 hours.
The county policies and procedure manual addresses employees with nonstandard work hours and says elected officials, including Dr. Germaniuk, have the right to modify the county’s written employment practices “at their sole discretion.” It says executive or professional, nonunion employees, including coroner investigators, “are compensated for a straight 40 hours within each work week, regardless of the number of hours actually worked.”
Such employees should work 40 hours per week “to maintain the credibility of sick leave and vacation accrual, which is based on hours worked.” Hours worked at home “shall not be counted toward minimum hours required unless such work is specifically assigned by the employer.”
Professional employees are exempt from overtime and “often are required to work unusual hours and may also be ‘on call’ due to the nature of their occupations,” it says. “Such flexibility will still be contingent upon working the required” 40 hours per week.
ELECTED RIGHT
Adrian Biviano, the county auditor, says that because of the technical nature of a medical operation, Dr. Germaniuk “makes the call on how to compensate employees.” He also has that right as an elected official.
Mazanetz said she and Dr. Germaniuk think the key to whether the system is working is the lack of complaints they get about the work investigators do.
“There’s never a time you call the coroner’s office and don’t get a reply,” Mazanetz said.
She said the salaries of the investigators reflect training. “It’s the background of four registered nurses that have the ability to know how to handle the situation,” Mazanetz said.
When Talstein and Bollas asked whether someone without a nursing degree could do the job, Mazanetz said: “I just laughed and said, ‘Go for it then, because I’m out of here.’”
“Some days are very, very trying,” she said of her work, which includes making death arrangements for people with no family and working with Medicaid for payment.
While on call, she may get a page from a medic about a death, call the medic, decide whether to call Dr. Germaniuk, call the medic again to give him or her instructions, possibly call a body-removal team, and get another call back indicating the body has been delivered. In a homicide, there could be calls to and from a detective.
“How do you document that? There may be 15 minutes between calls, like between medics getting there and a detective arriving,” she said.
Talstein says it’s concerning that the investigators’ 2016 payroll records show large amounts of compensatory time paid “without clear documentation that the base 40 hours have been worked during the workweek.”
The three nurses eligible to convert unused vacation and sick time into cash converted 447.11 hours of unused vacation time and 344.07 hours of sick time in 2016, Talstein said. Those hours also raise the county’s Public Employee Retirement System costs, Talstein said.