Vacation Pay Fix Underway in Mendota Heights

After thousands of dollars worth of vacation pay was discovered to be accumulating for a number of Mendota Heights city employees, a revision of existing policy has been approved to put a kibosh on some of the excess.

Rather than enforcing a city policy that unused vacation in excess of 20 days must expire at the end of every year, the city has been , and paying off sometimes-sizeable lumps of vacation benefits in the case of a retirement.

City Administrator David McKnight unearthed the issue last year. “Its just a rule we need to enforce for a number of different reasons,” he told the city council at their last meeting.

A new policy approved last week by the council increases the number of hours an employee can hold on to from 160 hours under the previous policy to 200, but makes it clear that any hours over 200 will be forfeited at the end of the year.

The city will have to pay off the hours in excess of 200 in 2011 dollars, a cost of about $115,000.

The policy applies only to non-union staff, among which the police chief and police sergeants rank. Nine of the 15 employees identified last month as having vacation hours over 200 were employed in the police department.

Contracts with two unions are set to be renegotiated this year, and McKnight said he’ll propose to include the new policy language in both.