Hourly City Employees To Receive Holiday Pay To Compensate For Transition To New Payroll Process

Christmas is coming early this year for hourly employees of the City of Glenwood.

Last week, the Glenwood City Council approved giving 30 hourly employees one week of “holiday time” pay on their Nov. 16  paychecks to ease the pain of a transition being made in payroll processing at City Hall.

The change in payroll processing will create a one-week lag between the time employees submit timesheets to their department heads to the time paychecks are received. City employees are paid every two weeks. Currently, they submit their timecards for a two-week period worked on a Wednesday and receive their paychecks the next day via automatic deposit into their bank account. Glenwood City Administrator Amber Farnan proposed the change to give City Hall staff more time to accurately process the payroll. The processing is done by hand through a multi-step process.

At a city council meeting in September, police officer Richard Rix said the change will create a one-time financial hardship for some employees because they’ll receive just one week’s pay on the first paycheck after the transition is made.

“Basically, we would be getting one week of pay instead of our normal two weeks of pay,” Rix said. “With that, the week of pay we won’t be seeing immediately, we would not make that up until we would essentially end our employment with the city.”

Under the current payroll process, paychecks received on Nov. 16 would include hours worked from Nov. 2-15, but with the transition, the Nov. 16 paychecks will be for hours worked Nov. 2-8. One week of holiday pay will be added to the Nov. 16 paycheck to make up for a second week of pay.

“City Council recognized the need to change our payroll process that had been in effect for many years. They felt this change was warranted, but knew it would create a hardship for employees as we switched to a pay as you work system to a week lead time for payroll process,” Farnan said. “To alleviate this hardship, city council is offering a concession of holiday time for full and part-time employees. This holiday time will be regularly scheduled hours for the week of November 9-15th.”

Farnan added that employees will be paid straight time for the holiday hours.

Technically, the city isn’t calling the holiday pay concession a “bonus” but the 30 employees will receive a regular full week’s pay twice for the week of Nov. 9-15. They’ll be paid holiday pay for the week of Nov. 9-15 on their Nov. 16 paycheck and then be paid for the actual hours worked Nov. 9-15 on their Nov. 30 check.

The additional pay is projected to cost the city nearly $25,000.

“I estimate we will be paying out 1,043 hours in holiday pay (full-time holiday hours - 840, part-time holiday hours - 203),” Farnan said.  “The cost of these holiday hours is around $24,500, depending on whether there are IPERS covered or not, it could be an additional $2,300.”

Farnan said salaried employees and department heads will not receive the holiday pay, nor will full-time fire and rescue personnel because they are paid on a different pay schedule than the other city employees.

The holiday pay was unanimously approved by the city council at its regular meeting last Tuesday.