By VICKI URBANIK

The county’s move toward rescinding overtime pay and reverting to the past practice of giving employees paid time off came under fire Monday from two elected officials.

County Sheriff David Lain said if he can’t pay his officers and jailers overtime as now proposed, “ it will take police off of the streets and it will take jailers out of the jail.”

Similarly, County Clerk Pamela Fish said she’s still dealing with the impacts of accumulated compensatory time in her office under the county’s previous policy. Because her office is already short staffed, she said if she allows employees to take time off, the work will become even more backed up.

“It just makes no logical sense,” she said.

With mounting overtime expenses ever since the county banned comp time in February, the council last week began to eliminate overtime in next year’s budgets and agreed to work on a new comp time policy aimed at preventing the past problems of accumulated time off.

Lain said the sheriff’s department had a mixed comp-overtime policy that worked well and which, he pointed out, was praised by the council just last week as a model system.

Council member Dan Whitten, D-at large, a former police officer, said he doesn’t see how the county can completely end overtime for the sheriff’s department, as he questioned how the sheriff could be expected to tell an officer that his shift is over in the middle of an accident scene.

But council member Michael Bucko, D-4th, suggested that the sheriff should be able to bring in others, particularly those with less seniority, to cover for those off during comp time.

Whitten said this would mean that the person brought in to cover someone else off on comp time would in turn rack up more comp time.

“We’ve got to find something somewhere,” said council member Karen Conover, R-3rd, who noted that one person in the sheriff’s department was once off with pay for two months due to accumulated comp time.

Council President Bob Poparad, D-1st, said the details still need to be worked out, but that employees who accumulate comp time will need to use it within a set time period.

Council member Rita Stevenson, D-2nd, said the “obvious” solution for the sheriff to keep adequate patrols is to move to 12-hour work shifts.

She faulted Lain for not considering the extended shifts, but Lain said he has never refused to consider the move. Conover said 12-hour police shifts work well in Valparaiso and that Gary’s police force is moving to the 12-hour shifts as well.

But Lain said that city police departments function differently and that the sheriff’s department has services, such as a dive team, SWAT team, and bomb squad, that municipal departments depend upon.

Lain, however, agreed to consider the 12-hour shifts.

Posted 8/19/2008