If Punxstuawney Phil was right on Tuesday, winter is far from over, but Tom Short and Zeb Carney have one request of Old Man Winter — could we please see the remaining storms hit on Monday-Friday from 9 a.m.-noon?
“It’s been like clockwork, the storms have either hit on a holiday, Christmas or New Years, or on the weekend like this last storm,” City Administrator Short said after Tuesday’s Carthage City Council Public Works Committee meeting.
“Anyone who maxes out on comp time will get up to five weeks off later this year and we have a couple of people who are over 100 hours,” Public Works Director Carney added. “We can’t stop plowing the roads but we have backed off on plowing the secondary streets at times outside normal business hours.”
Three major snowstorms have hit Carthage so far this winter, taking a big bite out of the public works department’s overtime budget.
Short said the overtime budget is nearly gone and city workers are piling on the comp time after the city council expanded the number of comp time hours a city worker could accumulate in a year to 120 hours.
Carney reported to the public works committee that city workers put in 238 man-hours of overtime while cleaning up from last week’s snow storm alone. That doesn’t include the overtime and holiday time accumulated during the Christmas and New Year’s storms.
The 238 hours of overtime adds up to 357 hours of comp time or an average of 15 hours of overtime worked per employee on top of their regular 40 hours a week.
For now, the workers are accumulating compensatory time, or time off to be taken later this year, at a rate of an hour and a half for each hour worked.
When an employee reaches 120 hours of comp time, the city will have to start paying those employees overtime once again unless the city decides to expand the number of comp time hours an employee can accumulate once again.
The problem, according to Carney, is that employees will probably want to take that time in the summer, and employees who get to 120 hours of comp time will have available to them a total of five weeks of time off including vacations.
All this is coming in a budget year where the city’s finances are strained by falling tax revenues and increasing expenses in a poor economy.
In other business, Carney told the committee that the company the city had contracted with for the past three years to collect household hazardous waste at one-day collections had filed for bankruptcy.
In a certified letter to the city, the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality informed the city that it could be responsible for paying to dispose of hazardous waste collected over the past three years by Hazmert, a Springdale, Ark.-based company.
Apparently Carthage’s hazardous waste has been stored on the company’s property along with the waste collected from dozens of cities in Arkansas, Missouri and Oklahoma, and large companies such as Tyson’s and WalMart.
Carney said he would attend a meeting on Friday in Springdale to find out what the city’s responsibility might be and protect the city’s interests.
