As part of their contract, City of Davis employees can take their vacation time and cash it out. How much and under what circumstances that can occur depends on the employee and their contract. There are in fact substantial differences in the various contracts in terms of the restrictions and at times even encouragement to cash out vacation time.
This practice may be seen as problematic for a number of different reasons. First each contract has a line that declares, “The purpose of annual vacation leave is to enable each employee annually to return to work mentally refreshed.” This stated purpose would seem to be contradicted by the notion of being able to get cash in lieu of vacation time.
How much of a cost? We only looked a brief period, but 2007, the city has paid out three-quarters of a million for people not to take vacations. It is difficult to judge the current year as it is in progress, so from 2007 to 2009, the city paid just over $700,000 to such employees and as much as $262,000 in 2008.
While that is not a number that breaks the bank, it again is not insignificant. That number represents nearly a quarter of our current deficit for instance. It is also unclear if such payments are budgeted in. It also appears factor in the employees who cash out their entire vacation upon retirement. Such accrued vacation time could be substantial and unbudgeted.
A manager can only cash-out up to 40 hours per year, “Employees are able to cash-out up to forty hours of vacation as long as (1) the employee has at least 15 years of service with the City and (2) the employee has a minimum of one year of accrued vacation on the books.”
Managers with 15 years of employment get up to 27 days of paid vacation every year. However, they also get paid “management leave” every year.
According to the city benefit summary, “10 days management leave each calendar year (3.08 hrs/pay period). Leave can be used in one of the following three ways: 1) Take 100% of the management leave as time off with pay. 2) Receive a cash payment for 50% of the management leave and time off with pay for the remaining 50%. 3) Receive a cash payment for 100% of the management leave.”
That benefit applies to management employees, department heads and the assistant city manager.
For department heads, they do not have a 15 year rule, they cannot accumulate more than one year of unused vacation, and there does not appear to be a 40 hour cap. On January 15, unused vacation time is automatically cashed-out.
The current DCEA contract is structured similarly to the management contract except the employees can cash out as much as 80 hours and they only have to be city employees for 10 years rather than 15.
The bottom line, and it would be difficult to figure out the costs, most city employees who have worked for 15 years, get nearly six weeks of paid vacation per year, they also receive 12 holidays plus 2.5 floaters, which is nearly three weeks of paid holidays, management gets another 10 days for management leave per year.
As we said at the onset, the ability to cash-out vacation is not itself a budget buster, but it does add a considerable cost to the city doing business, at a time when the city is furloughing employees, leaving positions vacant, and cutting back on city services. This is certainly something that the city ought to continue to examine.
Davis is certainly not alone in this and not the most abusive. The most we saw an employee cash out in a single year was $11,000, although we do not seem to have the totals that were cashed out upon retirement, that might have been far more substantial, and given the number of employees who have retired in the past year, that bears looking into.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
You might also add that we have quite a large (and well compensated) planning staff for a City which is now effectively no-growth or very slow growth.
If there was a need for staff to work long hours helping with many new projects there could be some justification for this practice and perhaps some depts really do need the extra staff time, but I suspect that in many cases this amounts to giving employees who are, for the most part, well-compensated even higher pay at the expense of the City and its taxpayers.
In my opinion, there are 3 justified types of cash-outs:
1. If an employee is terminated (just because the city no longer had the money to keep him employed), he should be compensated for his unused vacation time, earned in his last year of employement;
2. If an employee retires and starts on his pension, he should be able to cash out his unused vacation time, earned in his last year of employement; and
3. If an employee requested time off for a vacation, but due to staff shortages his manager told him he could not take any vacation time, he should be able to cash out his vacation time for that year.
It never makes any sense for employees to be able to accumulate multiple years of vacation time and then cash it all out at the end of their employement. That does violate the notion you refer to above–“to enable each employee annually to return to work mentally refreshed.” However, I don’t think that type of abuse is taking place in Davis. I recall a case in San Jose where a firefighter retired and cashed out more than $100,000 in unused vacation time and even more than that in unused sick leave. We don’t have that in Davis.
What we do have here, for all of our veteran employees (15 years and more) is way too much paid time off–that is why many are cashing out a week or more of paid vacation every January 15. But like everything else, that won’t change unless we have a city council willing to change the contracts in the coming years.
Another outrage almost everytime you turn over another Davis rock! City contracts/policy should require effective USE of this generous amount of annual leave. Making vacation time just another way to increase one’s salary encourages unhealthy employees, supervisor abuse of staff in scheduling work and efforts to find less honorable ways of getting rest and time off.
“Management leave!” What is the justification for this practice? Certainly not to improve the morale of the regular workers uwho don’t get this extra two weeks of time off or, more likely, extra pay. What happened to the concept that managers put in whatever time it takes to get the job done right….
There are so many ways these policies work against good city management. The only thing that could compound the damage would be premium pay or “comp time” that would further discourage use of annual or sick leave. Do we use compensory time off practices?
Does the city use flexible schedules (four 10-days a week, for example)? Staff who live in another city could end up in Davis just a few days each month.
You can’t hold this against the staff who walk into this odd system. Is this all on the Council, or does the City Manager or other hiring officials get to offer these benefits.
JustSaying-‘”Management leave!” What is the justification for this practice? Certainly not to improve the morale of the regular workers who don’t get this extra two weeks of time off or, more likely, extra pay. What happened to the concept that managers put in whatever time it takes to get the job done right….” In point of fact many civil service exempt managers show up for an hour or two in the morning, go to lunch, kids dental app.s, off-site with vendors.etc, because their contract doesn’t have hourly requirements. The reasoning being that since they have to attend council and staff meetings at odd hours and of course take the heat from the top and the public when something goes awry. Some abuse the privilege, some don’t. In my work life, I once had a supervisor who was always the first one on site in the morning, worked his subordinates every second on the clock, in fairness he also rigidly observed break and lunch time, and micro-managed the whole operation. We always looked forward to his annual vacation when, for a month, we could get the real work caught up and order the supplies we would need for the next year. Most of the senior maintenance staff wished he’d taken another month in the fall to ease our load.
[i]”‘Management leave!’ What is the justification for this practice?”[/i]
It is meant to compensate those who work lots of overtime — late night council meetings; other commission meetings; long budget talks; labor contract negotiations and so on — yet are on salary and hence don’t get paid anything for overtime*.
For some positions, this seems to me reasonable. However, it’s not clear to me that everyone who gets management leave** — I recently looked into this — really works more than 40 hours in a typical week. Yes, there are some weeks that are very taxing for some of our “managers.” Some of those are expected; others are emergencies. But most weeks, for many of those getting management leave every year, are just 40-hour (or less) work weeks, which is far less than say, someone who works in a management or executive capacity in most private businesses.
*This is the exact contract language: [quote]The purpose of management leave is to partially compensate each EMPLOYEE for the time that such EMPLOYEE is required to devote to CITY business outside of normal duty hours. EMPLOYEES receive no other compensation for the extra time they devote to CITY business and, as such, are entitled to management leave with pay.[/quote] **Not counting Department Heads or the City Manager or the Asst. City Manager, there are 39 “managers” who get this benefit. They include the Urban Forest Manager, the Property Management Coordinator, the Fleet Manager and the Child Care Manager.
Biddlin:
Guess there are pluses and minuses to having a dedicated supervisor.
Rich:
Can we assume those who qualify for “management leave” don’t have the typical flexibility to adjust their schedules like most exempt managers? So they’re expected to put in the same regular hours as those they supervise, then they get the 10 extra leave days whether or not they put in the extra time (or much more)?
Regardless of whether “management leave” is earned by extra work hours, this should be a “use it or lose it” benefit. Payment for other leave should be limited to the situations you noted in your first comment. Of course, the payments average a couple hundred thousand dollars a year as David points out.
Wonder how much sick leave is earned, and if it’s managed in a similar manner….
The term, “manager,” does have a meaning in a textbook sense, but it is quite common for local governments to designate the title improperly. For example, management texts will tell you that a supervisor has leadership responsibility over multiple subordinate employees gathered together to do a specific task. A manager is the next level in the hierarchy and has control of multiple supervisors with dissimilar task assignments.
Davis is typical of city governments that give what are essentially entry level “employees” the title of manager. They have no management skills, training, or experience. They are task oriented and supervise nothing or nobody, let alone manage. The job title sounds impressive, looks good on a resume, and is often a substitute for a more generous pay package.
An additional advantage to the government employer for anointing phony managers is that they are exempt from overtime compensation and other labor union and federal labor law benefits.
[i]Davis is typical of city governments that give what are essentially entry level “employees” the title of manager. … The job title sounds impressive, looks good on a resume, and is often a substitute for a more generous pay package.[/i]
Phil Coleman surely knows more about this topic than I do (given his long history working for the City of Davis). But in a few instances with the City of Davis, I have been told of this happening: an administrative employee, who perhaps is good at his job and is well liked by his superiors, has reached the peak of his income slot after say 4 or 5 years on the job. There are no higher positions available for him to move up to. So the City Manager will create a new “management” position for the employee which pays 75-100% more in salary (and comes with other better benefits). The employee is doing the same job. It does not appear that the employee’s salary was increased at all. Rather, the employee simply took on more “responsibilities.” But in reality, this employee is not a manager of anyone, and his responsibilities have not actually changed.
On the one hand, this seems abusive and misleading. However, I think it is somewhat more complicated. The City Manager created the new title because he values such employees and believes he will lose them if he cannot offer them more money.
I don’t know if, practically, there is a better way of doing business. But if it were possible, I think a better approach would be to give the city manager the flexibility to increase the pay for certain administrative positions above what those positions are slotted for, as long as the city manager can find savings elsewhere to cover the costs of that kind of an increase. In effect, this is what does happen. It’s just that when you take non-managers and move them into titles which sound powerful, such employees end up costing the taxpayers much more than they would have if the city manager simply had the authority to give them a 10% raise above what their title says they should make.