County Commissioners will wait to implement Lincoln County’s new cell phone plan after department heads balked at proposed reimbursement numbers last week.
Thirty-six county employees carry county-owned phones. The commission’s goal is to eliminate those phones altogether.
The newest plan, revised over the past two months to trim the county’s $21,000 annual bill, lets department heads offer a salary reimbursement for county employees to help them pay for additional minutes on their personal cell phones.
The commission passed the plan with a rough set of numbers on June 2.
Employees are meant to use the reimbursements to pay for minutes added to their personal plans for calls relating to county business.
The move will also take the administrative duty of managing cell phones off the Auditor’s to-do list.
On June 23, department heads said the reimbursement figures were not high enough.
Only two officers in the Sheriff’s Office have home phones, Lincoln County Chief Deputy Jim Zick told commissioners, but they use their county phones during work hours.
Some officers might not be keen to use their personal phones for county business if the reimbursement rate does not cover the additional expense, Zick said.
The June 2 resolution allotted $3,480 to the Sheriff’s Department this year for 16 phones.
“That initial proposal was so low that I was truly concerned with a couple of my guys saying ‘that’s too low - no,’” Zick said.
The Sheriff’s Office will need to dispense the money among it officers, as well. The Sheriff’s Office will decide how much reimbursement each officer is entitled to based on the amount of county use the cell phones get.
The office doesn’t have time to keep track of those numbers, Zick said.
“We’ve got enough managerial problems dealing with 25 people,” he said. “I’ve got no intention of monitoring bills month-to-month.”
The Highway Department’s share– $540 per year for three phones – drew scrutiny from Superintendent Allan Bonnema.
“That $540 is about half of where it should be,” Bonnema said. “As others have stated, we’ll make it work, but I don’t think the dollar amount is applicable.”
Under the subsidy program, employees probably will end up paying out of pocket for county calls, Planning and Zoning Department Head Paul Asleson said. That will put an undue burden on employees, he said.
“It appears to me that any plan that you put in place, if it doesn’t pay the entire bill, will put some of these youngsters in a tight place,” Asleson said.
Plenty of non-government jobs require a cell phone as a precondition of employment, Commissioner Jason Melcher said, so the question ought to be how much is it fair for the county to pay.
“In my research, they just expect you to have a phone,” Melcher said.
The Sheriff’s Office put together an alternate set of numbers, and Melcher encouraged the other department heads to do the same.
“We need to come up with something fair so we can figure out what works.”
Some employees are on call 24 hours a day, Emergency Management Director Harold Timmerman said, and the county shouldn’t expect them to foot the bill.
“I still believe that if you have a 24/7 person, the county should pay for that bill point blank,” Timmerman said.
Two months ago, Auditor Paula Feucht drafted a three-tiered plan to reimburse individuals that would have saved up to $10,200 a year.
Earlier this month, Melcher and Commissioner Dennis Weeldreyer offered the alternate plan to allocate funds to department heads with an eye on savings of between $8,000 and $9,000.
After hearing their concerns, Weeldreyer told the department heads that the commission will not move to implement the plan until the department heads sketch out their needs.
The county needs to spend less, Commissioner Jim Schmidt said, but he also indicated that the needs of the on-call employee are an important consideration.
“I know we’re trying to save money and all those plans are very good, but I have to judge in my mind how fair this is to those people who are on call 24/7,” Schmidt said.