Twenty-five current and former Henderson Police Department officers will receive reimbursement for lost pay that began when the city of Henderson switched pay plans for hazardous duty employees in 2016.
At the end of its special called meeting Tuesday, the Henderson City Commission went into executive session, and when the board came out, it approved a municipal order that will reimburse pay for some HPD employees who were officers in December 2016.
City of Henderson Human Resources Director Megan McElfresh said the payback amounts range from the largest at about $12,000 to the smallest at about $500. She said some of the officers are still with HPD and others have gone on to other jobs.
Those that are still with HPD have been contacted, McElfresh said. But those who work elsewhere still need to be contacted, and McElfresh will spend the rest of the week trying to make that happen, she said.
The way the pay discrepancy came about is complex and so has the work that it’s taken to go through pages and pages of pay records to determine just who deserved what and how much.
The city started to switch hazardous-duty employees from a city-wide pay plan to a hazardous duty pay plan in 2016. In December 2016, only HPD employees switched to the new hazardous duty pay plan. (Henderson Fire Department switched at a later date, according to City Manager Dylan Ward).
In the spring of this year, city staff—with city commission approval—began to switch those hazardous-duty pay plan employees back to the city’s non-hazardous pay scale (now the city’s pay scale for all employees). At that time, discrepancies were found with some officers’ pay and the city began to investigate, McElfresh said.
What they found was that officers—and no employees at a sergeant or higher rank—at the time were put into an incorrect category, or step, based on their years of service. For instance, an officer who had worked three years and three months was categorized as an officer in year 3 when the officer should have been categorized as year 4. Ward explained it that an officer who on his or her very first day is in year 1 of his or her career and on the first anniversary moves into year 2.
To make matters more complex, McElfresh and HPD secretary Wendy Sugg found that records showed some of the affected officers would receive the correct pay for part of the year and the incorrect pay for the other part. They had to follow this checkerboard pattern and correct it on pay records for the officers, some for several years and some even longer—all the way until May of this year, McElfresh said.
They also had to take into account promotion tests and cost of living adjustments, as well as other intricacies of the pay plan, to determine the correct payback for each affected officer. Some officers ended with 70-page reports providing the details for their reimbursed payments, McElfresh said.
Anyone hired starting in 2017 or later is not affected, said the city.
The amount of reimbursements going to the affected officers totals about $166,000, but the city will end up paying closer to $250,000 when figuring in taxes.
“This would have been money they would have earned along the way,” Ward said. “It’s the right thing to do.”