2015-01-28 Merit Appeals Board Minutes

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Merit Board of Appeals January 28, 2015 We've updated other policies—Recruitment and Examination dealing with hiring above the minimum—in order to help with our recruitment and retention of employees. We've also updated our Compensation procedure for dealing with across bargaining unit type of movements and actions. Compensation adjustments are largely dictated by collective bargaining agreements when dealing with actions within a bargaining unit. Without a policy, there is no authority to dictate how to properly compensate someone when they're moving from one bargaining unit to another. For many years we had a policy, but one area that needed to be addressed in a better more organized fashion was the compensation for employees moving from or away from excluded management. Historically, a lot of these actions were done based on extremely old documents and, in some cases, just practice. Those were the most notable reviews. It's been quite a bit of work in the past year with regard to policy updates—maybe the most in this period of time that he can recall. We're committed and we're probably never going to feel like we're done. It's a constant review. Some of the policies he just mentioned will be effective in March along with their Rules. Once we get past that, we'll be looking at other policies to update. A few that come to mind are drug testing for the various programs we have in the County. They haven't been touched for five to ten years, so its' definitely worth looking at—among a few others. Ms. Rabago asked as far as if there's a promotional opportunity, whether they've maintained the 5% rule. Mr. Hermes replied that, by and large, those concepts haven't been tampered with. But to be clear with their excluded management, they did make some adjustments. Once they're promoted into management, it was a practice—if you moved more than two steps it's 10% and if it's three or more, it's 15°x6. They've researched it with other jurisdictions, as well as with our documents that go back to the early eighties where the inception of the EMCP occurred. Frankly, it just appeared to be arbitrary—and occasionally we were asked why. Why is it this? We never really had a straight answer. So, what we did was we scrapped that. And when moving into EMCP or away from EMCP, for every level that you moved—up or down—it's 4%. The root of that 4% is that in most contracts, especially the HGEA where many of the ranges come from— the difference between ranges is 4% or approximately thereof. Now, we know Page 14