GEARY COUNTY—Geary County Sheriff Daniel Jackson responded to criticism from County Commissioner Trish Giordano on the use of sick leave as part of federal pandemic legislation that limited the amount for each employee to 80 hours total.
According to Giordano, "fifty county employees went over the 80-hour limit, some receiving several hundred hours while still accumulating sick leave and vacation. In total, employees used 7,000 hours of admin leave, 6,500 of those hours were in the Sheriff’s office. I checked with the Riley County police department which also runs their jail, and employs more than double what Geary County does; they used only 459 hours in the same time frame."
In his response, Sheriff Jackson wrote:
As an elected official I have a moral obligation to be completely honest and transparent with the citizens I serve. Since being elected Sheriff I have gone to great lengths to ensure that whatever the situation was, good or bad, as a Sheriff’s Office we were completely transparent about how we handled the situation. After reading Commissioner Trish Giordano’s editorial I again feel obligated to get all the information surrounding a situation to the citizens who deserve to know the complete truth.
When the pandemic began we started to have employee’s get exposed to covid positive citizens while conducting their assigned duties. I went to the County Commissioners, Keith Asher, Brad Schultz, and Charles Stimatze to discuss allowing the employee’s to use admin time when under KDHE and health department mandated quarantine or isolation. We all agreed that this was the right thing to do, that an employee should not be punished because of the pandemic and forced off work times. This had nothing to do with the emergency sick leave act mentioned in Commissioner Giordano’s editorial, and also did not have an 80 hour cap to it.
In Commissioner Giordano’s editorial she indicated that 50 county employee’s went over the 80 hour limit and that 6500 hours of the time were in the Sheriff’s Office.
The Sheriff’s Office did use 6500 hours of admin time, but it was only 27 of the 114 Sheriff’s Office employees that went over 80 hours. And now for the rest of the story….
Of the 27 employee’s that went over 80 hours, two were involved in an officer involved shooting and were on mandated admin leave for 106 hours until cleared on the shooting. One of these employees then went on to contract covid and had another KDHE mandated isolation period. The other Deputy caught covid on one occasion and had a family member become covid positive requiring two more KDHE mandated quarantines.
When we experienced our first spike in cases across Geary County, we also had our first outbreak in the jail. At this point the courts were closed as well. I made the decision to close the front office of the jail and get all nonessential employees out of the office. This resulted in 7 administrative employees being sent home on 80 hours of admin time. These employees were not sick and not on vacation, they were ordered home to help in our containment of the outbreak in the jail. Each of these 7 employees experienced at least one more, and some two and three more KDHE mandated quarantines or isolation periods.
During this same outbreak we also closed our VIN and Process Service sections. This resulted in 5 more employees who were sent home from work for 120 hours due to the outbreak in the jail and the spike in Geary County.
Three of the employees who went over the 80 hours were employees who were experiencing serious health issues when the pandemic began. These employees worked up to the point that there Doctors advised that a covid exposure could be deadly for them. Two of these three employees had not worked for the Sheriff’s Office for very long and did not have leave or vacation hours to cover them. These three employees accounted for 1380 hours of the admin leave used at the Sheriff’s Office. All of these employees have fully recovered, returned to work and are still valued employees of the Sheriff’s Office now. This would not have happened were it not for admin leave.
The other 10 employees of the Sheriff’s Office who exceeded 80 hours each had multiple KDHE mandated isolations or quarantines due to covid exposures while at work and interacting with covid positive citizens, becoming covid positive because of exposures at work, or family members being positive for covid.
I monitored our use of admin time continually and I assure you there was nothing excessive or abusive about how the Sheriff’s Office used admin time in response to the covid pandemic. Commissioner Giordano said the admin leave was created to prevent people who do not have leave to take to be able to be paid during the pandemic. That is only part of the reason it was used. It was also used to prevent employees from burning through all their leave and sick time due to KDHE mandated isolations and quarantines. It was also used to allow us to send nonessential people home during outbreaks, at our direction. In other words so we didn’t have to do sporadic nonpaid layoffs during times when we were trying to control outbreaks.
Shortly after Commissioner Giordano was elected she asked me if I had been monitoring the admin use at the Sheriff’s Office and I told her I had. She never asked me about it again. If she would have asked I would have been happy to explain everything as I have in this letter. The problem with that is the explanation has a tendency to take away some of the splash in the media that just throwing the 6500 number out by itself gets.
I stand by the decisions made by the previous commission and me in reference to employees, admin leave and covid. To do otherwise would have been a disservice to our most important asset, our employees, and to the citizens we are sworn to protect.