In a meeting Monday lasting less than 10 minutes, the Warsaw Common Council approved an ordinance amending the police section of the city’s employee personnel policy handbook.
Presenting ordinance 2022-03-05, Mayor Joe Thallemer said, “The way I understand it, this is a clean-up of some information that was inadvertently put in.”
Human Resource Director Jennifer Whitaker said the language that is in the handbooks currently is not the language that is supposed to be in there.
“That was one of the options that we had when it was given to us by Joe Pettigrew when we were redoing our handbooks. And Chief (Scott Whitaker) and I were able to get together and decide to use the language that is much easier to understand, which has been the same language since at least 2009,” she said.
When she uploaded the attachment, it had the old language instead of the new.
“So we just need to put it back to how it was because it appears that we would be paying police officers double time when in fact we don’t do that. So it was important that we corrected that,” Whitaker said.
“So we’ve always paid time and a half (for) overtime,” Thallemer said, and Whitaker said they have to, yes.
“So anything over physically working 171 hours in a 28-day work period – that’s (Fair Labor Standards Act) – we chose that schedule and we do pay time and a half,” she stated.
It was inadvertently put in the handbook as double time and there’s no change in benefits, she confirmed.
“Glad you caught it,” Councilman Mike Klondaris said. Whitaker said Chief Whitaker caught it.
The Council approved the ordinance on first reading, suspended the rules and then approved it on second reading unanimously.
