The Starke County Commissioners are trying to decide on a snow emergency policy involving employee pay if the county is under a no travel order due to snowy conditions. The Courthouse had to close once in December of 2010 and again in January of this year because the county roads were closed due to snow. A funding mechanism was in place through the state and federal governments where the county could get funding to make the roads passable if an emergency is declared in the county.
Commission President Dan Bridegroom brought up a couple of questions at the last meeting: How are you going to take care of the government employees when they are told not to come to work? Are they eligible for pay or not?
“Earlier on, I had looked at some counties around the state who have a policy set in place,” said Bridegroom. “A couple of counties are allowed two snow, or emergency, type days and they pay their folks for those days. Beyond that then they are not paid. The problem I ran into was that most of these counties I talked to are down south and they don’t have a lot of snow down south. When they do have it, their situation is actually more severe because they do not have snow plows. So we’re going to have to come to a general consensus of how we’re going to take care of this and hopefully we’ll have all that ironed out before the next commissioners meeting.”
