Near the end of last night’s Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly Meeting, multiple assembly members asked for clarification regarding a memo sent to employees regarding Paid Time Off. It reads:
Kenai Peninsula Borough Assemblyman Jesse Bjorkman in last night’s meeting asked for clarification. Borough Mayor Charlie Pierce said, “What we’re required to pay an employee reimbursement under the CARES act is 80 hours. Just today you’ve heard that we exhausted in this last pay period over 400 hours. We’ve got a number of employees that are off and I guess what I’d say is that we’ve been very accommodating in paying employees that are off. We are really trying to let employees work from home. But I think at the same time, restricting out of state travel, there’s quarantine requirements that come with that too. We’ll talk with each individual employee if they choose to travel, but they’ll have to have personal leave be covered for the time it requires them to quarantine when they come back.”
Bjorkman was concerned that the memo tells employees what they can and can’t do on their personal time, asking if there’s contractual or legal language that allows that to happen. Mayor Pierce responded, “I’m not familiar with the legal or contractual language. That’s an HR department question. What we’re saying is we’re not going to approve any Borough business travel at this time. I’m not at liberty to discuss it because I don’t have all the details and I don’t want to misinform anybody.”
Mayor Pierce added that this was a question that didn’t need to be discussed at the assembly meeting.
Assembly President Brent Hibbert asked for clarification from Pierce, who said, “What I’m familiar with is if you’re gonna travel outside of the state, right now it’s gonna require a certain amount of quarantine time. What I would say is you have to look at whether you’re gonna qualify to be paid for it. We’ve been paying employees for their quarantine up to now. We need to look into the 80 hour requirement under the CARES Act provisions, which says that we’re required to pay an employee 80 hours. One event, 80 hours. When you’ve exhausted that through quarantine matters, then you’re in an out-of-pay status where you’re using your own annual leave. We’re trying to make employees aware of the fact that they need to make decisions to travel to make sure they have personal leave time that will cover that when they come back. The comments that I understand in the memo that went out were specifically related to business related travel that we have, in the past, denied. When we first went into mandates from the governor when we were in lockdown situations, we put a travel ban on all borough related travel and we are doing that again today based on the numbers that we have.”
The problem is, that’s not what the email says. Assemblyman Willy Dunne asked for clarification, “All the assembly members did receive an email that was sent out that did say that ‘due to the increase of COVID cases we are once again implementing restrictions for the use of PTO for out of state travel, for all borough employees’, so that’s personal time off. So it sounds like no borough employees will be permitted PTO to travel out of state unless it’s for a validated emergency. I understand Mr. Bjorkman’s concerns and we would like some clarification on this and it looks pretty clear in the email we all received that this is borough employees on personal time off being restricted on where they can and cannot travel.”
Borough Mayor Charlie Pierce says that a follow-up memo will be sent to borough employees clarifying what the email said.
