2020-09-30 Merit Appeals Board Minutes

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Merit Appeals Board September 30, 2020 it's a unique circumstance. It's, if an employee felt that or if they came in direct contact with somebody who was COVID-19 positive or a family member who was COVID-19 positive—and that contact was prolonged over a period of time, not just a quick passing. Then what the mayor would allow the employee to do is take five days of paid administrative leave and then go, with the understanding that they'd go and get a COVID test, and that they would report their findings from the COVID test. If their findings was negative, they would come back to work. If the findings was positive, then those other leave, whether it be sick leave or whatever, would come into play. So, those were the three areas specifically for the rules. Also, what we did was our department was responsible for the mayor instituted a number of areas—response areas as it related to the virus and what we did was we initiated a system where we would hire 89 -day emergency contract hires for specific response to the COVID-19 pandemic. And we were fortunate enough where we could use the Federal Cares Act money to pay these salaries. So, some of the things we had to onboard or some of the areas that we had to onboard employees were airport screeners, quarantine exemption screeners, contract tracing assistants. Department of Public Works hired 28 sanitation disinfectants, who would go out and spray all the public areas. Parks and Recreation hired about the same number of sanitation disinfectants who would go and spray, disinfectant through all the parks and all the Parks and Rec. facilities. And just recently, last week, I sat on a interview panel where we—due to the situation at the Okutsu Care Home veterans' care home they identified to us the management identified to us that their housekeeping staff was decimated by COVID-19 positive test results. So they were down to just one house cleaner. So what the mayor did was he used, again, a 89 -day emergency hire. The County hired four housekeepers and I sat on that interview panel last week, and effective yesterday, we sent up four housekeepers to work under the guidance of the Okutsu Care Home to perform the housekeeping duties. So, that's just—and all that onboarding, the drafting of the contracts, the interviews with the intended applicants, the actual application process—we're totaling, right now, maybe about 70 or 80 new hires within a four-week, five-week period of time. And all those onboarding processes came through our HR Department. Another thing that HR was involved with is when the County issued protocols and practices for their public interactions for their departments, I served on the County Departmental Inspection Team. It was myself, the Managing Director, the head of the COVID-19 Taskforce, and also the representative from the Department of Public Works. And we did a Countywide COVID-19 protocol inspection and we went department -by -department and we walked physically walked through all of the operations of each of the departments and we assessed, and we made recommendations as to whether or not the proper COVID-19 safety protocols were being in place. And so, that was another area that we involved ourself in. Page 15