The Kenai City Council unanimously enacted an ordinance that would amend Kenai Municipal Code intended to create a new category of Temporary Employee called “Program or Project Employee” and establish benefits for this new employee category.
City Manager Paul Ostrander told the Kenai City Council:
“Right now, code limits temporary employees to six months and temporary employees are exempt from PERS (Public Employee’s Retirement System), but the limitation to six months has been an issue for us, as a matter of fact. Currently, we’d like to have our grants administrator, our grant writer, go full time to 40 hours a week and extend beyond six months, probably up to about two years because of the significant amount of infrastructure money that’s going to be available to the city. Right now, the limitation of six months is the primary issue. This new category of employee would allow us to bring this category of employee on for a multitude of reasons, but one of them is for a specific project that’s going to take more than six months and they would be exempt from PERS.”
Ostrander said there is going to be a follow-up resolution to exempt the employee from PERS:
“Because this ordinance is not effective until, I believe, May 6th, we have the next meeting to get that in front. Christine (Cunningham, Human Resource Director) is actually working with PERS at the state of Alaska to determine the best way to craft that resolution.”
In addition, the ordinance also addresses several housekeeping changes to provide consistency in the city’s municipal code as well as to clarify that participants working under the State of Alaska’s Mature Alaskans Seeking Skills Training (MASST) program are not city employees. The MAAST training program primarily is utilized by the Senior Center, and the state pays participants as well as provides workers’ compensation benefits through a grant from the U.S. Department of Labor.
The ordinance was enacted unanimously.