2018-05-09 Merit Appeals Board Minutes

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Merit Appeals Board May 9, 2018 And under Health and Safety, we have Workers' Comp. And our run—our HR Department runs on a approximately 2-point—you know whatever budget—million dollar budget. And, unfortunately, the Workers' Comp Division runs on an annual 2.1 million dollar budget as well. And when we—when we're in this type of economic environment, every dollar counts—and with the help of my deputy who has a strong risk management, safety—health and safety background—we're implementing steps to do more of a structured analysis of the Workers' Comp Division where we're establishing performance criteria as it relates to processing of cases ensuring that the appropriate payments are being made to claimants and the like. And just, somewhat, changing the mindset of the division so that it becomes more of a situation where when a claimant files a claim, the approach is more of the fact that we value you as an employee. We're going to understand that there's always bad apples no matter what you look at. There'll always be bad apples or bad actors. And but, the approach that I would like to take and, again, as seconded by my deputy—is the fact that we understand there's still bad apples. We understand that there may be some issues—fraudulent claims—but, for the most part, they're not when we look at these claims. So, I think if we're able to change the mindset, we're able to address performance goals, criteria's, and continually evaluate them. And the component is—and which I strongly believe in and I said this at the council is—from my fire background. I firmly believe an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. I think if we address these situations, these circumstances, we address the needs of the employees through the implementation of a much more progressive safety program. We're already started with Department of Environmental Management. There's discussion that the next department we're going to look at, is establishing a safety program with Parks and Recreation. The reason we picked those was `cause those are our highest repeat offenders areas where we get the most claims outside of police and I believe the second one parks and yeahso outside of those those are the areas. So, we're implement—we're in discussion with the department's heads and the managers and we're going to institute a safety program, which has some teeth to it. So, oftentimes, when you talk "safety" or "safety programs"—it's always, like, the employees feel like"Oh, yeah, this is a great thing"—and then, all of a sudden they start talking about issues and nothing ever gets done. It's like, oh, thenso, they start getting the employee start getting disenfranchised because there's no follow through. The other thing is that happens with these programs is these programs quickly turn into a complain session. There's another word that is generally used but, for my terminology, it just turns out to be a complaining session and nothing really gets accomplished. So, those are the two red flags or areas of concern that we want to ensure that going forward we don't fall into that rut. We want these safety committees to be effective. We want them to be positive. And we want the employees to know that they have confidence in that—they know, Page 11