Lebanon County is incrementally increasing workweek hours from 35 to 40 for certain employees, a move that contributes to a proposed half-mill increase in real estate taxes for 2024.
The adjustment comes as employers across the private and public sectors are finding it challenging to find a talented workforce to fill open positions in today’s job market.
That’s especially true in the public sector where salaries traditionally lag behind similar positions in the private sector. To combat this inequality, Lebanon County Commissioners have been proactively raising salaries during 2023 and making other changes to retain current employees while working to attract new ones.
That process continued Thursday, Dec. 21, at the commissioners’ biweekly meeting, with numerous new hires that also witnessed the further development of a recent trend: an increase in the weekly work hours for certain departmental employees.
County administrator Jamie Wolgemuth told LebTown after the meeting that the hourly increase in workweek hours is a recent trend that continues thanks to ongoing workplace challenges. While a majority of county workers have a 35-hour workweek, some are seeing an increase to 40 hours.
“There are a number of departments whose workload has increased and we have employees who are working more than 35 hours. We end up having to either make adjustments or they don’t get the work done or we provide them with compensatory time, which is hard to use when you don’t have enough time (to use the comp hours),” said Wolgemuth.
“In this job market, everyone is looking for hires and they’re just not there. So when you have people working 35 or 37.5, do you try to fill vacancies or do you just increase everyone’s hours and maybe get a full-time equivalent out of that.”
Wolgemuth noted this has been an issue since the Great Resignation of 2021, when workers quit their jobs en masse following the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
“It’s no secret, we talk about it at almost every meeting, about the difficulty in finding hires and when we’ve been at 35 and it makes more sense to (increase to) 40,” said Wolgemuth.
LebTown asked Wolgemuth if there is a plan to increase the hourly workweek in Lebanon County for all county employees.
“It seems like it is happening incrementally – 35 to 37.5 for some, which is 2.5 hours extra per week,” said Wolgemuth. “Then in a few years, it goes to 40. But no, there isn’t an overall plan that says by such and such year we’ll all be 40 hours. But, it depends on the demands of a department when it has been happening and, union contracts, in some cases, are driving that too.”
Wolgemuth told LebTown that the increased hours that have been added for fiscal year 2024 have been baked into the current budget proposal, which if adopted by the county commissioners at a Dec. 28 special budgetary meeting will increase real estate taxes by .50 mills.
When county officials presented the budget on Dec. 7, salaries were a primary reason for the proposed half-mill increase from 3.8925 mills to 4.3925. State law requires the county budget to have a 20-day public review period before it can be officially adopted.
Read More: Lebanon County Commissioners vote to raise 2024 taxes by half a mill
“Thirty-five to forty hours is a 14-percent increase in salary and benefits, not necessarily healthcare, but all of those other fringe benefits,” said Wolgemuth. “It is a cost that contributes to the overall budget and what I’ve said is that these increased employee costs are what’s driving these expenses.”
At its last regularly scheduled meeting for 2023, numerous personnel transactions highlighted an otherwise light agenda on Thursday. The following personnel transactions were all unanimously approved by the commissioners and are effective Dec. 24, unless otherwise noted.
The commissioners voted to enter into a collective bargaining agreement with Teamsters Local 429 involving the Lebanon County Court Related Non-Professionals represented employees in the district attorney’s prothonotary/clerk of courts, public defender’s, register of wills and sheriff’s offices, for a four-year term from Jan 1, 2024, through Dec. 31, 2027.
Highlights include: wage increases at $3 per hour for 2024, and 3.50% increases for 2025-27; increased on-call compensation to $350 per week; increases in medical insurance deductibles; increase in the hours worked for deputy sheriffs and the union administrative positions within the sheriff’s office to 40 worked per week with ½-hour unpaid lunch period; probationary period changed to 90 days without paid holidays; increase to travel expense reimbursements to $12/$16/$25; and “other noneconomic revisions to articles.”
The following positions were granted weekly hourly increases from 35 to 40 hours: fiscal assistant at the county prison; director, deputy director, assistant director-customer service, assistant director-fiscal, fiscal administrator and training administrator within the county’s domestic relations department; and the director at the veterans affairs department.
The stipend for the on-call warden at the county prison was increased from $150 to $200, and a part-time interpreter for the sheriff’s office was hired for building security at $350 annually.
Pay increases from grade 9 to grade 10 on the nonunion salary chart were granted in the county’s probation department for the collections officers and accounting clerk C positions. Permission to hire a fourth collections officer was approved and the accounting clerk C positions were renamed as collections clerks.
Three new part-time positions were created at the Renova Center at a rate of $55 or $60 per hour with no county benefits, effective Dec. 31, 2024. (It was noted that the contract provider was no longer able to staff these positions, so the county created them at the hourly rate that was already established by the contract provider.)
Also at the Renova Center, the second-shift differential increased by .80 cents per hour and by .75 cents per hour for third-shift employees.
In a separate action item tied to personnel transactions from the Dec. 7 meeting, Commissioner Jo Ellen Litz said that she voted against seven new hires at that meeting but those minutes reflected that she voted to approve them.
After a lengthy discussion that at times became animated, the commissioners agreed to amend the minutes to show that Litz voted against those seven new hires, and Commissioner Robert Phillips noted that the vote to make those hires was 2-1 instead of unanimous.
Those new hires, as noted in a personnel transaction summary obtained by LebTown, show that these individuals began their new positions either on Dec. 11, 2023, or Jan. 2, 2024. One of those seven hires is the county’s new full-time solicitor, Matthew Bugli, who was hired at a biweekly rate of $3,023.53.
Bugli replaces Dave Warner, who was technically the county solicitor on a part-time basis. Before Thursday’s meeting was adjourned, Warner thanked the commissioners for hiring him and allowing him to be the county solicitor for nearly 11 years. Warner is leaving that post after being elected in November as a magisterial district judge in Palmyra.
Read More: Lebanon County 2023 general election results
In other county business, the commissioners voted to:
- Nominate Donald Krall of Lebanon and Jennifer Albright of Jonestown as Lebanon County Conservation District directors. Krall will serve as a farmer director while Krall is a public director.
- Approve the reappointment of four individuals for three-year terms through December 2026 to Visit Lebanon Valley’s board of directors. The reappointees are Josie Ames, Mike Osborne, Kerry Royer, and Rick Stammel.
- Grant two applications for county aid through the Liquid Fuels Tax program and reallocate funds for a third municipality. The two grant recipients Mount Gretna Borough, $831.67 for a crack sealing project, and South Londonderry Township, $8,776 for seal coating there. A total of $163.79 was reallocated for a 2023 paving project in Heidelberg Township.
- Obtain $3,875.19 from the PA Counties Risk Pool (PCoRP) Loss Prevention Grant program to trim 10 trees and remove two stumps from the parking lot area at the Area Agency on Aging and purchase seven electric space heaters to only be utilized in case of a furnace malfunction at the agency. The seven space heaters cost $200.19 while the landscape project totals $3,675.
- Enter into a SAVIN Maintenance and Service contract with the Pennsylvania District Attorneys Institute. The program notifies victims of movement by criminal offenders as defined in Act 77.
- Table a motion to provide $7,500 of a projected cost of $15,000 to the St. James Players to install public restrooms at their venue at the Lebanon Valley Mall. The commissioners agreed to speak to the organization since the Hotel Tax Grant program is designed to promote and market activities within Lebanon County and not to fund capital projects.
- Issue a proclamation recognizing four generations of the Kreider Family and their involvement with 4-H, the county fair and expo center and other agriculture-related organizations in Lebanon County for the past nine decades.
- Approve the treasurer’s report.
- Approve the minutes of the Nov. 21 executive session, the Dec. 13 executive session concerning real estate, and the Dec. 7 meeting. (This motion also carried with it a bit of parliamentary rigmarole that merits a brief explanation. Although chairman Robert Phillips was interrupted when calling for a motion, and did not explicitly specify the “Dec. 7” meeting minutes were among those being approved, Wolgemuth said to LebTown in a follow-up call that the commissioners had the actual minutes in front of them and while Phillips didn’t specifically state that date for approval, the commissioners knew what minutes they were taking a vote. As such, no further future action was needed to indicate the vote pertained to the Dec. 7 meeting. Additionally, before the vote was taken to amend the Dec. 7 minutes per Litz’s request, Phillips did reference “the last meeting” twice before the vote to amend the Dec. 7 minutes was taken.)
Following the treasurer’s report, county treasurer Sallie Neuin told LebTown that six months into the county collecting school taxes on behalf of Lebanon School District that the program is running smoothly.
Read More: County treasurer to collect Lebanon School District’s real estate taxes
“A lot of people were happy that there is a local place to go,” said Neuin about taxpayer response to the county providing a local outlet for payment of school district taxes instead of remitting them to an out-of-county collector.
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