City council tackles overtime, worker’s comp issues
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RONAN — Three Ronan police officers say they’ve been running themselves ragged without overtime pay for the past few weeks to keep the town safe in wake of an officer shortage, even as an eligible officer has gone unused.
Officers Tim Case and Pat Noble told the city council last week that they have been receiving credit for future days off in exchange for working overtime.
“Pat and I have been working a lot of hours because we need to,” Case said. “Before when we weren’t working those extra hours we were getting calls and no one was there. The day we both came in early we had three traffic accidents ... Every day we’re in we’ve had something major happen.”
City Attorney Kathleen O’Rourke Mullins said bringing criminals to justice through the courts system sometimes means asking the officers to work more than they are scheduled.
“They have deadlines to meet,” O’Rourke Mullins said. “I need stuff from Pat, but he isn’t working days ... He’s going to have to come in during daylight hours and finish his reports.”
Noble and Case will be the town’s only two officers on duty for much of the month of August, as a third officer completes National Guard training. So far, both men have racked up so much credit for future days off that it is not reasonable that they use all the days in the future.
“We couldn’t ever take that much time off,” Case said. “We’d like to be paid for the overtime so we don’t rack up 120 hours in comp time.”
The issue was relayed to the city council’s finance committee for approval.
Some city council members asked why some of the office work couldn’t be assigned to Officer John Mitchell, who has been off-duty on worker’s compensation for health reasons since he was demoted from the police chief position in April.
Mitchell has been cleared for light duty and is willing to come back to work, according to City Clerk Kaylene Melton.
Melton asked if there wasn’t some sort of office work or phone answering Mitchell could be assigned to help lighten the work burden for other officers.
Officer Noble suggested that Mitchell could do office work or work on the radios that have experienced a number of problems in recent months.
But Mayor Kim Aipperspach said it isn’t time to bring Mitchell back.
“The work is not available at this time,” Aipperspach said.
