T-R PHOTO BY ROBERT MAHARRY City of Marshalltown Human Resources Director Jill Petermeier, left, addresses the council while Councilors Mark Mitchell, middle, and Barry Kell, right, look on during Tuesday night’s regular meeting.

The third discussion item of Tuesday night’s Marshalltown city council meeting covered a series of revisions and additions to the policy manual for employees, and City Human Resources Director Jill Petermeier came before the council to offer a more detailed breakdown of the changes, especially those that will have an impact on the overall budget.

The first was the introduction of a voluntary furlough policy, which would allow employees to take up to five unpaid furlough days per fiscal year and potentially save the city money on wages. Conversely, another change would impact the budget in the opposite direction by providing a $1 per hour bilingual pay incentive.

“I don’t have any benchmarking for that. I like to usually give you that, but I don’t, unfortunately, have any. I did have four staff members track, for a week, how many customers they assisted where their bilingual skills were necessary, and we had 50 customers that were impacted in a week,” Petermeier said. “So that’s just to show you what the value is that our staff are giving to those customers.”

Councilor Gary Thompson asked Petermeier how fluency would be determined and whether being fluent in more than two languages would warrant an additional pay bump. Right now, she said it is specified as only $1, and they don’t currently have anyone fluent in three languages.

Thompson also raised a concern about a clause regarding employees in the finance department who are required to take five days away from handling money in their first year.

“Are we just sending them home without pay?” he asked.

Petermeier redirected the question to City Finance Director Diana Steiner, and on the fluency determination matter, she said another coworker could have a conversation with the employee to test them. The city also has an arrangement with Marshalltown Community College (MCC) for testing at a minimal cost.

Steiner said the current policy is that first year employees don’t have any vacation, so they have been taking the five specified days off without pay. They will now be starting with three days of vacation once the policy revisions go into effect.

“I don’t like the idea (that) we’re hiring employees, and just because of the nature of their job, we’re making them lose money by going home. We can’t move them into another position? We can’t have them go out and sweep sidewalks or something?” Thompson asked. “I’m just not happy that they have to give up pay.”

Steiner did say the employees could be moved into other roles on those days. During the public comment period, Jim Shaw asked if the five days were mandatory or voluntary, noting that Fisher Controls had an unpaid days off option when he worked there.

City Administrator Carol Webb said the policy revision under discussion was strictly voluntary and alluded to possible confusion between that and the specific policy for finance staff.

“For three of my staff who have been here for a while, we do take five consecutive days off. For the new people that just started, it is difficult. They have wanted to take a vacation, so they took it without pay. And so then they have five days off,” Steiner said.

Thompson reiterated his concern that the policy for finance staff wasn’t fixed as part of the revisions and worried about the impact it would have on first year employees.

“We’re forcing them to take time off away without pay. We don’t do that with anybody else that I know of,” he said.

Steiner said she could work with Petermeier to assign other tasks for employees who still wish to work on those days, and Webb agreed. Mayor Joel Greer was “miffed” that the city hadn’t offered any vacation time to first year employees, and Petermeier felt the change would be helpful in recruiting potential staff to work for the city.

Another change will be increasing the amount of vacation time to two weeks after a year as opposed to the current one week. Thompson then motioned to bring back a formal policy revision for council approval with language “fixing” the aforementioned policy for finance employees.

Fellow Councilor Barry Kell asked Thompson for clarification on what he was expecting, and Petermeier then weighed in.

“What we’ll do is we’ll put language in there, councilors, because if they don’t want to take those full five days, we’ll make sure that we have language in there that will relieve them of their finance duties for a five-day period in their first year,” she said.

The motion carried by a unanimous 6-0 tally with Greg Nichols absent.