A county employee is going to be paid for nearly 600 hours of compensatory time she earned.
The Brown County Council and Brown County Commissioners had to work together to find a solution. On June 17, the council approved transferring money to pay $18,551.17 to juvenile probation officer Brenda Dewees for 588.75 hours of comp time she has accrued over the years, as she dealt with an increase in children needing her attention.
Any employee with more than 100 hours of comp time is supposed to meet with their supervisor to develop a plan to reduce the time to less than 80 hours.
During budget hearings last summer, Dewees’ supervisor, Chief Probation Officer Jennifer Acton, told the council that Dewees had 390 hours of comp time. She told the council she was trying to figure out a way to pay those hours out.
The council gave her no solution to the comp time problem then, but they did allow the department to hire a new assistant. Acton had asked for another full-time probation officer and an assistant. The new assistant began working in January.
“We’ve known about it and discussed for the past two years,” Acton said at the May 20 county council meeting. “I don’t have anyone else to do her job.
“If you noticed tonight, she’s left this room at least three times because she’s taking calls for juveniles each time. I have to pay her for that,” Acton said about Dewees.
During the May 20 meeting, Acton said the department has spent almost all its budget for juvenile detention. “We’ve had more kids in detention than we ever had before,” she said.
The amount the department spends on juvenile detention has gone up $10,000 each year. “What that means is she’s putting in more hours. She’s getting calls after hours, she’s making that call to whoever is going to detain them, dealing with the officers, getting the report and then doing all of the paperwork to get them into court,” Acton said about Dewees.
She said the movement within court systems now is to get “everyone out of jail and everybody on probation.”
“Probation officers are social workers. We do counseling with them, which we never had to do before. In the early days, it was pretty much check in, pay and see you later. Now it’s much more of a therapeutic endeavor, especially with the juveniles and with the juveniles you also have their families,” Acton said.
“It’s very time consuming.”
Acton said probation officers are on call, especially Dewees.
“The juvenile officer gets calls the most. … It’s usually about kids she’s working with, and I don’t have that information. The officers really need to talk to her. We do give her a break every now and then when she goes on vacation, but generally they need to talk to her,” Acton said.
“It has just exploded here recently. I don’t know if it will get any better. … We haven’t seen any relief.”
The money to pay Dewees will come out of the probation department’s user fee funds and not from the county’s general fund. “This is money that has been building up all of these years. I’ve checked with the State Board of Accounts. It’s an informal adjustment fee. We can use it for programming for juveniles,” Acton said in May.
At the meeting in May, county commissioner Diana Biddle said Dewees’ workload justifies hiring a second full-time juvenile probation officer.
“I know for a fact that there are some juveniles in our system that our juvenile probation officer is probably their lifeline. I think 500 hours of comp time … speaks to her going over and beyond for the position, and the things she’s providing to at-risk juveniles in our county,” Biddle said.
“Five hundred eighty-eight hours says to me that there’s enough work there that absolutely cannot be done by one person. I’m the last person to say we need to add somebody, especially one with an unfunded mandate for the salary. It’s absolutely worth looking into.”
Biddle said that even though the county’s policy states to keep comp time below 80 hours, Dewees had to continue accruing that time since she is an officer of the court. “The court has to provide certain services and it doesn’t matter what time is involved. Those services have to be provided to those children,” she said.
Council Vice President Dave Critser said he wants to prevent employees from accruing comp time in amounts like that in the future.
“The reason I am so upset is because we went through this years ago. The gal took six months at the end of the year. She had a six-month vacation and that office was empty because it wasn’t figured into next year’s budget that she’s going to take 500 hours,” he said.
“I’m upset because we try to cure a problem and it comes up again. … Money is not the question here; you’re worth that and a little bit more. The question is policy.”
Dewees said her comp time continued to grow because her assistant didn’t start until the beginning of this year. Her assistant has been helpful in lightening the workload now and has helped to decrease her comp time this year, she said. “We’re still trying to get our feet wet, figuring out how best the assistant can help. It has been very helpful,” she said.
Dewees reiterated the fact that the department has been looking into ways to pay out the comp time and that she has been trying not to accrue it.
“We can’t not pay you for this because it’s extraordinarily valuable work that you’ve done. … We appreciate your selfless commitment to it,” council President Dave Redding said.
At the June meeting, Dewees said the department now has a plan in place with the new assistant to prevent issues like this one.
“Lord knows I didn’t enjoy working all of those hours and missed out on a lot of stuff, so it’s not healthy for me to do that either. … I can’t promise you I won’t earn any comp time, but I’m hoping if I earn it, I can take it, like take care of it the next pay period or whatever. We have taken this very seriously,” Dewees said.
Currently, there are approximately three other county employees who have comp time between 60 and 80 hours. One employee is over 80 hours, but Biddle said “that will take care of itself once the summer season is over and we go into winter.”
