2021-04-26 Merit Appeals Board Minutes

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Merit Appeals Board April 26, 2021 CHR. CABANAS: Okay. That'd be fine. Thank you. MR. BRILHANTE: Okay, great. Okay. Well, again, thank you very much. Moving forward just a brief report for our department. Last week, it was a Countywide budget review hearings for this upcoming fiscal year. And we submitted a general status quo budget. Being a small department, we don't have much capital we're not going to buy six vehicles instead of ten and the like. So, it's really hard for us to have any significant type reductions. We're very mindful of the fact that we're in a really tight economic environment right now with the pandemic and the like. So, we've been really fiscally conservative and mindful of the situation. I think the council appreciated that. They didn't have much questions for our department. However, there was some discussion regarding Workers' Comp. and that was just something I wanted to briefly touch upon today. From the onset of me taking this position, I always had an uneasy feeling not "uneasy" but uncomfortable feeling with Work Comp. I was concerned because, you may or may not know, the County is self-insured. So, that means every dollar that goes out is paid directly out of our pocket. We don't have an insurance carrier. And the reason for that is, it's because just not economically feasible to have a carrier. The monthly insurance premiums would be astronomical. So, it's just you do a cost benefit analysis and it is what it is. The County's self-insured in other areas as well—our vehicles and the like. So, with that, I was always concerned because Work Comp.—for a county, our size—our claims have been running at about $2 million annually. Oftentimes we would have to go in and ask for more monies as we would go forward. The unfortunate part with Work Comp. is the fact that you can't really plan for what may happen. It's inevitable. You can have the best training in the world. You can take as many precautions as reasonably foreseeable—and yet somebody can still get hurt. And so, it's not like you can say I have a $2 million budget and that's enough to cover the budget. It's all dependent on the workforce—how safe and if there's going to be any accidents. Unfortunately, we recently had a significant accident with one of our employees. There's going to be significant financial outlay to cover the injuries. The employee was in the ICU at Queens Hospital for a long period of time. And just recently had to be transferred to a physical rehabilitation center—and that's going to run us about $3,000.00 a month. So, if you extrapolate that out over a period of one-year, you're going to have significant expenses associated with just that one injury. And so, one of the things I always believed as the director is that, going back to my days as a fireman was the fact that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. As I look back and as I assess and evaluate our Work Comp. Division, I think one of the areas that we really—we Page 5