Working with chemicals and reading water meters are among the hazards that qualify workers for extra pay.
By ED RUNYAN
WARREN — Trumbull County Sheriff Thomas Altiere awarded his six management employees hazardous duty pay of about $500 each per year around the middle of last month, one pay period after all of his union employees started getting it by contract.
The practice of giving extra cents per hour to certain employees whose jobs involve hazardous duties, however, goes back about 15 years in various other county departments, county Personnel Director James Keating noted.
In the contract between the county and the union representing the sheriff's department's 98 employees that went into effect in mid-February, corrections officers and assistant wardens were given hazardous duty pay of 12 cents per hour the first year, 20 cents the second year and 30 cents the third year. Deputies, sergeants and lieutenants were given 14, 23 and 40 cents per hour.
They never had hazardous duty pay in their contract before, said Ernie Cook, chief deputy.
Because workers are already in the second year of that contract (it was retroactive to October 2005), Altiere gave his workers the hazardous duty pay rate given to the deputies, sergeants and lieutenants in the second year of their contract: 23 cents per hour, said Leslie Stredney, the sheriff's personnel director.
That adds up to about $9.20 per week, or $478 per year. Starting this October, when the rate goes up to 40 cents per hour, they will get $832 per year in hazardous duty pay.
Other departments
Meanwhile, the 2002 contract calls for four other departments to get hazardous duty pay of 25 cents per hour. These are the sanitary engineer's department, dog pound, maintenance department and vehicle maintenance.
Gary Newbrough, sanitary engineer, said the most recent contract increased hazardous duty pay to 30 cents per hour effective Jan. 1, 2007, and is given to all meter readers, water operators, sewer workers and treatment personnel. Essentially all of his employees receive the extra pay except office personnel, he said.
Two of his management employees, the wastewater superintendent and the person in charge of the water operations, also receive the extra pay because they spend 75 percent of their time in the field, he said. The department's eight other management workers do not qualify for the pay, he said.
Ronald Simone, a warden at the dog pound, said all of the workers there are union, including the chief dog warden, Robert Campana; all qualify for hazardous duty pay. All of the workers, including the secretary, handle dogs, and "we all get bit," Simone said.
Al DeVengencie, director of the building and vehicle maintenance departments, said most of his workers qualify for hazardous duty pay because they work with chemicals, but no office employees get it.
Cook said he believes the six administrators in the sheriff's department deserve hazardous duty pay as much as other county employees who get it. Cook noted that the six administrators all have hazardous elements to their jobs.
A month ago, the six were in line to get between $4.25 and $8.71 more per hour over 39 months. Altiere revised the numbers to increases of $1.29 to $1.94 over two years. The nonunion managers will get the same pay increase of 3.25 percent in the first year and 3.5 percent in the second year that unionized sheriff's employees received.
Altiere said he decided to decrease the administrators' raises because of the area's difficult economic conditions — not because he was pressured to scale back the increases.
Commissioner's view
Commissioner Frank Fuda said it is not the job of a county commissioner to tell an elected county sheriff whether it is proper to give his management personnel perks such as hazardous duty pay.
"Those are decisions the sheriff makes. All we can do is make sure we don't give them a whole lot of money that he's not going to spend wisely," Fuda said.
Commissioners approved a 2007 budget of $8.6 million for the sheriff's department early last month, a 3 percent increase over 2006.
runyan@vindy.com