Council OKs one-time bonus for Village employees

By LENNY C. LEPOLA

News Assis­tant Man­ag­ing Editor

Money is always a prob­lem; and it’s become more of a prob­lem since the reces­sion began in late 2008. We would rather not have to think about money, but like for­mer world heavy­weight box­ing cham­pion Joe Louis said: “I don’t like money, actu­ally, but it qui­ets my nerves.”

Dur­ing last Wednesday’s Sun­bury Vil­lage Coun­cil meet­ing, coun­cil mem­ber Tom Zalewski asked if coun­cil mem­bers were going to help calm vil­lage employee’s nerves a bit by con­sid­er­ing raises for 2013.

Sun­bury Mayor Tommy Hat­field reminded Zalewski that dur­ing the pre­vi­ous vil­lage coun­cil meet­ing, coun­cil mem­bers talked about raises ver­sus a one-time bonus payment.

“We had dis­cus­sions with Dave Mar­tin and some of the vil­lage lead­er­ship and decided on a bonus as opposed to a raise,” Hat­field said. “Part of it will be a one-time pay­ment based on salary, part of it for performance.”

Hat­field said the idea was to make the pay­ment in Decem­ber of this year because of money that’s left over in this year’s budget.

“We have $41,758, I would like to ask coun­cil to appro­pri­ate $43,000 to dis­trib­ute to all employ­ees includ­ing part-time,” Hat­field said. “The bonuses will be based on salary plus per­for­mance rat­ing. We thought it was appro­pri­ate adding part of this around employee appraisals.”

Fol­low­ing the approval of a motion to appro­pri­ate $43,000 for vil­lage employee bonuses, Hat­field said it was a very del­i­cate sit­u­a­tion because employ­ees have not had raises dur­ing the past three years.

“Regard­less of where an employee’s salary is, they con­tinue to do a really good job,” Hat­field said. “We looked real hard at this, I looked at next year’s bud­get real hard, and we’ll look at this again next year.”

Posted by Gary Henery on Dec 5 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.