Housing panel nears new personnel policy

August 02, 2006

By Pat Litowitz
New Castle News


The Lawrence County Housing Authority has moved closer to implementing an overhauled and expanded personnel policy.

The remaining issue for the authority’s board to resolve focused on compensatory time for its 19 salaried employees.

Board members and staff met in a work session yesterday to make final adjustments to manuals affecting administrative and maintenance workers. The board will vote on the new guidelines at its Aug. 10 meeting.

“We’ve spent enough time hashing and rehashing this,” solicitor Louis Perrotta said.

Chairman Robert Heath has pressed his colleagues since January to revamp authority personnel procedures. Citing significant shortcomings in the current manual, Heath said items such as grievance procedures, vehicle use and comp time needed to be defined.

Although illegal in the private sector, comp time is a tool public agencies are permitted to use in place of paying overtime. Like overtime, comp time is paid back at a minimum time-and-a-half rate.

“It’s not like it’s a business,” James Phelps said of agencies such as the housing authority. “It’s a tax-based ‘industry.’

“In the private sector, we don’t allow comp time. Each work week stands alone.”

Phelps is an investigator with the U.S. Department of Labor’s wage and hour division in Pittsburgh.

Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the housing authority is required to have a written understanding or agreement with its salaried employees before comp time can be issued. The current policy does not address the topic.

“I want to set the exact standard,” Heath said of the new policy.

Executive director Robert Evanick has authorized comp time to employees in the past.

Maintenance supervisor Rob Ratkovich is owed 34 hours. Nick Mariano, the authority’s public housing inspector and safety officer, has accumulated 31 hours. Clerk Mary Fishe and Dennis Marlowe, assistant maintenance supervisor, have 13 and six hours, respectively, owed to them.

As a supervisor, Ratkovich is exempt from federal regulations regarding comp time. If and when Ratkovich does receive it, it will be at Evanick’s discretion.

“We don’t have to give it to him if we don’t want to,” Evanick said.

Ratkovich’s predecessor, Angelo Burrelli, had received comp time and overtime pay.

Board members and Evanick took a different view with regard to Mariano. In his role as security director, Mariano is on-call 24 hours a day.

“It’s really unfair to a guy like Nick, who gets called out in the middle of the night” not to give him comp time, Evanick said.

Because part of Mariano’s duties involves law enforcement, Perrotta said he must research how federal regulations would apply to him.