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(D) Phil Weiser
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February 05, 2007 04:59 AM UTC
27 Comments
When I moved my biz here I paid my old employees bonuses for staying with us until we closed the old office and moved out of town. It worked pretty well.
Standard operating procedure in the real world, outside of politics. $61,000 is a small price to pay.
What I don’t like are the accummulated vacation and sick pay. People should be required to take their vacations, and there shouldn’t be such a thing as accummulated sick pay.
When I was at Microsoft they had a policy about having to take some vacation each year. And each year I got a waiver because I was working on something critical and they needed me to keep working. I’m guessing for department heads the same would tend to hold.
My sister works for one of the big four accounting firms. She is required to take at least a week of vacation within the next month, due to the fact that she has 6 weeks accrued.
On this issue, the dispersement of vacation and sick days does not bother me, and I need to reserve judgment on the bonuses. If there is precedence for the bonuses or at least regulation allowing for it than I am ok with it. If not than, yeah, it does bother me. There is so much talk about cutting waste and spending, why should this be any different? I have switched jobs where I left and had a week or two off and then started with the new company. I am willing to bet that any company that hires a high level member of Owens’ team would allow for them to finish out the term of the governor without any repercussion.
I am curious though, I dont remember seeing this, has any person worked at a company that went out of business who was then offered a bonus on the close of that business? It seems counterintuitive, but, hey, anything is possible.
When hi-tech companies shut down in an orderly manner (ie ran out of money and not profitable) they always have bonuses for the final people paid if they stay till the end.
Otherwise, there would be no one left to shut it down.
– dave
I was unaware. Thanks.
Please see The Denver Post editorial posted elsewhere in this diary.
Where’s Health and Environment, Natural Resources… I’m a little suspect of this list.
Most of the amounts shown are accrued vacation and sick leave, not bonsues. As for the amount that was bonus, as the last poster noted, retention bonuses are common in the business world in analogous circumstances. Obviously different rules can apply to public employees, but the amount paid in actual bonuses wasn’t that large, so unless a rule was broken, this Dem could care less.
Mostly.
It seems that a department head knows damn good and well that his job will probably end on that fateful day in January. Why wouldn’t the public expect that person to stay without a bonus? Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out in December, you ingrate.
I’m shrugging this off only because the bonus amounts are som minimal in a budget of billions.
I think the vacation and sick pay monies are state policiy. I think they suck. I’ve never had an employer that paid me for sick days not used. Nor unlimited vacation accrual. Isn’t one of the purposes of vacation to be a well rested and freshened employee?
There is no precedent for a Gov awarding parting bonuses. The Denver Post editorial says:
Getaway paychecks too much
Article Last Updated: 02/07/2007 09:30:12 PM MST
For a state struggling to adequately fund higher education, not to mention one that has billions in unaddressed transportation needs, it was disheartening to learn of the half-million in taxpayer dollars doled out in hefty final checks to Gov. Bill Owens’ Cabinet and top staffers…
While the $187,298 in bonuses are disingenuous at best, the money for the accrued sick and vacation time reveals a tremendous flaw in the system, as operated by the Owens administration. No state employee should be allowed to cash out $40,000 or $50,000 in sick leave or vacation at the end of their tenure. Some top officials were allowed to collect lump-sum payments for unused accruals, while most state employees’ accruals are capped at 360 hours….
A republican, I read pols because of the volume, quality, and variety of posts. In the past the Pols staff has been noticeably left but not intrusively so. What’s w/ this thread? You post:
Farewell bonuses:
Marva Livingston Hammons,Human Services $61,099
More than $55k of this was accrued vacation. The state is legally bound to pay this. It is not a bonus. It tells me that Ms. Hammons spent maybe 5 yrs without taking a day off. That doesn’t sound like someone that is ravaging the public coffers. As for the bonus, I understand the difficulty keeping employees when they know their job is going away on a date certain.
Do you really think that there is something wrong w/ paying accrued vacation and a 5% retention bonus?
We didn’t write it
And perhaps extend an apology to those people whose accrued – i.e., not taken because they were too busy – vacation were part of the so-called extravagant “bonuses.”
Thanks for clarifying this important point!!! Looks like some people’s reputations have been improperly trashed.
It is not a “routine” practice. The Denver Post editorial says: Getaway paychecks too much
Article Last Updated: 02/07/2007 09:30:12 PM MST
For a state struggling to adequately fund higher education, not to mention one that has billions in unaddressed transportation needs, it was disheartening to learn of the half-million in taxpayer dollars doled out in hefty final checks to Gov. Bill Owens’ Cabinet and top staffers.
…
While the $187,298 in bonuses are disingenuous at best, the money for the accrued sick and vacation time reveals a tremendous flaw in the system, as operated by the Owens administration. No state employee should be allowed to cash out $40,000 or $50,000 in sick leave or vacation at the end of their tenure. Some top officials were allowed to collect lump-sum payments for unused accruals, while most state employees’ accruals are capped at 360 hours.
…
not to the author of the thread.
I think that generally those in “public service” are in it for the right reasons. I’m sure there are instances of those that are brokering power or drunk on attention (Mark Paschall?). I don’t know that anyone becomes a politician or bureaucrat for the money.
The Denver Post editorial says
Getaway paychecks too much
Article Last Updated: 02/07/2007 09:30:12 PM MST
For a state struggling to adequately fund higher education, not to mention one that has billions in unaddressed transportation needs, it was disheartening to learn of the half-million in taxpayer dollars doled out in hefty final checks to Gov. Bill Owens’ Cabinet and top staffers.
Owens, our fiscally conservative former governor, approved $187,298 in bonuses as parting gifts to top political appointees and staffers who stayed to the end of his term. The average bonus was $5,352. Another $309,000 was handed out to departing officials for unused sick leave and vacation time.
While the $187,298 in bonuses are disingenuous at best, the money for the accrued sick and vacation time reveals a tremendous flaw in the system, as operated by the Owens administration. No state employee should be allowed to cash out $40,000 or $50,000 in sick leave or vacation at the end of their tenure. Some top officials were allowed to collect lump-sum payments for unused accruals, while most state employees’ accruals are capped at 360 hours.
Gov. Bill Ritter should cap the amount of time his Cabinet and top officials can accrue to save the state future sticker shock, and to send a message about fiscal (and family) responsibility. Sick time should be viewed as an insurance policy of sorts, not a savings account. It’s there if employees need it, but it shouldn’t be considered part of their salaries.
We don’t begrudge Owens handing out reasonable bonuses to his loyal charges – though it should be noted his two Democratic predecessors did not. But they shouldn’t be sold to the public, as they’re being pitched now, as “incentives” to keep Cabinet members and others around until Owens’ term was over.
Joe Morales, former executive director of the Department of Public Safety, unwittingly blew the cover off that claim when he told The Post he was surprised to get a bonus of $5,150. “It was awarded for a job well done, loyalty and for sticking in there,” said Morales. “We take those jobs only to serve, and we hope that we make the state a better place.”
Top staffers were alerted to the bonuses in a Dec. 6 memo, about one month before Owens’ second term ended.
A bonus can only be used as an incentive if employees know about them in advance. Otherwise, they’re simply rewards for loyalty and service above and beyond.
Those types of rewards can be appropriate but should be used judiciously. But Cabinet members and top staffers should have to live under the same sick-time and vacation-accrual rules as everyone else. Taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for those golden parachutes.
be paid for more than 4 weeks of vacation time.
Who is “you?”
At my last job, which used a Paid Time Off (PTO) system which included vacation, sick, and holidays, there was a 300 hour cap. That’s 7.5 weeks of vacation if your supervisor would permit it.
They also allowed cash outs, so that you either didn’t “lose” accumulated time, or you could just count it as part of your income. They also set up a system where an employee could ask for help covering a long intended absence and others would transfer PTO hours to that coworker’s account.
It was a good system, I really liked it. Oh yeah, they had a separate bank for major illnesses. It accumulated rather slowly and you had to be really ill and prove it to cover your time off. Again, very fair. And no cash out at the end of employment.
state employees cannot be paid for more than 4 weeks vacation. Since much of the debate in this thread has to do with whether some of the money being paid out to Owens’ appointees was for vacation, I was just trying to clarify state personnel policy.
State employees cannot accumulate and be paid for unlimited amounts of vacation time.
real olde timers have different accumulation limits.
State civil service employees’ maximum annual leave accrual is based upon their years of service. The maximum for the most senior employees (I think 10+ years) is 336 hours, or slightly less than 9 weeks.
Of course, the cabinet members are not civil service employees, so the cap would not apply to them. I don’t know whether they have a cap, or what the cap would be.
State civil service employees have a 360-hour cap on sick leave, regardless of their years of service. That sick leave is not paid to them unless they retire (or resign when they are retirement-eligible); in that case, they are paid out 25% of their sick leave. I would bet that few, if any, of the cabinet members would be eligible for any sick leave payout if that limitation applied to them, which it probably doesn’t.
The Denver Post editorial says: Getaway paychecks too much
Article Last Updated: 02/07/2007 09:30:12 PM MST
For a state struggling to adequately fund higher education, not to mention one that has billions in unaddressed transportation needs, it was disheartening to learn of the half-million in taxpayer dollars doled out in hefty final checks to Gov. Bill Owens’ Cabinet and top staffers….
While the $187,298 in bonuses are disingenuous at best, the money for the accrued sick and vacation time reveals a tremendous flaw in the system, as operated by the Owens administration. No state employee should be allowed to cash out $40,000 or $50,000 in sick leave or vacation at the end of their tenure. Some top officials were allowed to collect lump-sum payments for unused accruals, while most state employees’ accruals are capped at 360 hours….
I’ve never been a big Bill Owens fan but I don’t think he did anything improper by paying bonuses to these people for staying at their posts until the very end.
If I recall correctly, he had staff people jumping ship a year or so ago because they knew the end was coming and lucrative job offers were being made.
Contrast these people staying on the job until the very end with the unseemly conduct of our state legislators jumping ship in December to beat the effective date of A-41.
No prior governor has ever awarded parting bonuses. The Denver Post editorial says:
Getaway paychecks too much
Article Last Updated: 02/07/2007 09:30:12 PM MST
For a state struggling to adequately fund higher education, not to mention one that has billions in unaddressed transportation needs, it was disheartening to learn of the half-million in taxpayer dollars doled out in hefty final checks to Gov. Bill Owens’ Cabinet and top staffers….
While the $187,298 in bonuses are disingenuous at best, the money for the accrued sick and vacation time reveals a tremendous flaw in the system, as operated by the Owens administration. No state employee should be allowed to cash out $40,000 or $50,000 in sick leave or vacation at the end of their tenure. Some top officials were allowed to collect lump-sum payments for unused accruals, while most state employees’ accruals are capped at 360 hours….
… so this bunch got the special treatment. In fact, when it comes to sick leave, I know of many faithful state employees who put in decades of service without taking much sick time off, but were denied payment for accumulated sick leave by the very same administrators who rewarded themselves in an unseemly fashion.