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HomeMy WebLinkAboutPersonnel Policy and Procedures Manual Sub-Committee June 29, 2016 PERSONNEL, POLICIES & PROCEDURES MANUAL CONFERENCE ROOM 291 SUB-COMMITTEE June 29, 2016 PRESENT: Hons. Lockett, Chairman; Hasan, M. Williams and Smith, members; Hardie Davis, Jr., Mayor; Frantom and Sias, Commissioners; Janice Jackson, Administrator; Chester Brazzell, Deputy Administrator; Michael Loeser, HR Director; Andrew MacKenzie, General Counsel; Jody Smitherman and Wayne Brown, Law Department; Lena Bonner, Clerk of Commission. Mr. Lockett called the meeting to order. Ms. Jackson: I just wanted to give you an overview. Everyone should have their agenda and if not we have extra copies. Our plan today is to give an overview presentation by our Human Resources Director, Mr. Loeser, to lay out the process so that everyone is familiar with the process we’re using to revise our Personnel Policies and Procedures Manual. Once we finish that presentation we’ll turn it over to Mr. Boxer who has drafted a number of these policies. Not completely finished but probably three-quarters of the way done, I believe. We were asked because of the request to have the ban the box discussion on tomorrow’s agenda, we will talk about that first. Once you all have the opportunity to discuss that and make a decision as to whether or not you want to refer his recommendation to the full committee or whether you want to make some revisions to that, we can have that discussion and as time permits we’ll go through the rest of the policies that he’s drafted. Then we’ll be open for discussion from members of the committee and we’ll go from there. We’ve planned this meeting for three hours from 12:30 to 3:30 so, Mr. Chairman, we’ll ask you to monitor the time as we go. Mr. Lockett: One other thing for clarification, there’s been a lot of misinformation out there about us having access to this report and not sharing it with the media. This commissioner as Chairperson this is the first I’ve seen it and I haven’t had an opportunity to read it. I didn’t want a copy of it because what I was doing was carrying out the will of this sub-committee. The last meeting we had when we tasked the consultant with doing certain things we tasked the consultant to get this information and bring it back to us. We didn’t task the consultant with sending incremental reports to anybody, to the Chair or anybody on the committee. That wasn’t it and as a result there have been miscommunication. This commissioner as Chairperson working on behalf of the sub-committee said that no one would get advance copies of this and that’s what I tried to do and I think as far as possible it was done. So I thought this might be important because the media is trying to make this something that I don’t think it is. Mr. M. Williams: I think that was a great comment and I agree with that. And there’s something to be added to the agenda that may not be added and if that had been done or not been done I guess now is the time to explain that. Had this been given out before this body proceeded? Mr. Loeser: No. This document, it was just handed out the first time today. Mr. M. Williams: Okay, well as Commissioner Lockett said, the media has been in an uproar about someone already having this document, already knowing the procedure and what’s 1 going to take place. I just wanted to clear that up so if that has not been done, I’ve got no problem but those were the issues and there’s some issues we need to talk about maybe not in this session but at another point in time. Mr. Hasan: I’d like the privilege of the same question if you don’t mind, but quite a little different, what made me think about the document but has anything been passed out about ban the box prematurely? Mr. Loeser: Well, the Mayor requested a copy of the consultant, from the consultant and we sent them a copy a few days ago but that was a draft copy. This has been modified since then. And also you have to talk to Carmen Alexander, the head of EEOC, on her portion of the policy. But that was I think what the question was. Mr. M. Williams: Yeah, I apologize. I’m sorry that I didn’t direct that but if this part had been given and I spoke with the Mayor about it, on the phone about it, if this had been done and you as Chairman didn’t authorize that I think that’s already been tainted. I think there’s an issue there that we need to address. I don’t think this is the place to address it in but I think it needs to be addressed now because it’s already premature. I’m not going to approve anything to be added to the agenda that we already done foreseen to be happening that we had not discussed in here. I think that’s wrong. I think it’s totally wrong. Mr. Lockett: Well, Mr. Loeser, when you said you talked with EEO or somebody else about this, as a result of the conversation you had with them, did that require a subsequent contact with the consultant? Mr. Loeser: Yes. So in other words basically I got the input from the subject matter experts like my immediate managers that report to me as well as the EEOC Carmen Alexander who I asked for input on that particular policy and I used that in drafting the policy. Mr. Lockett: That’s understandable. I mean you are the HR people and you all consulted with the consultant so that’s completely understandable. I have no problem with that at all. Okay, you can continue now. Mr. Loeser: Sure. With the permission of the sub-committee we have developed a path forward on this project and how we’re going to vet this information. It’s obvious that more than one individual needs to be involved. You need to reach out to subject matter experts and I delivered to the consultant the most accurate information (inaudible) so he can make a judgment call based on his experience and knowledge as to what the best practice for this organization would be. The vetting for policies, I broke this into two subjects: policies and procedures. The consultant would draft a policy with the input of the HR Department and subject matter experts which he’s done. Human Resources Department will review those, legal will get a chance to review it again before the sub-committee gets any document. The document that is in front of you represents roughly 75% of the total policies that were recommended or will be recommended by the consultant. The sub-committee is expected to discuss the changes and options as given by the consultant. The consultant will be noting various methods or decisions or paths you can take on a particular issue, what the pros and cons are and then make a 2 recommendation and support that recommendation. The consultant will then take the input from the sub-committee and modify the policy. Then we would recommend that it be reviewed with (inaudible) and give to Human Resources for further suggestions. The suggestions will then be noted by the consultant and modified and then be submitted again to the sub-committee for final acceptance. Once that product is accepted the final policies will be prepared. Again I will ask for review by our Legal Department and presented to the full Commission. Mr. Lockett: Mr. Loeser, do you have a copy of that for us? Mr. Loeser: Well, I didn’t have a chance to make a lot of copies. Mr. Lockett: Could you get us a copy before we leave? Mr. Loeser: Yes, before we leave. Authorizations, policies versus procedures. This is something that’s important that the sub-committee understand so this is the approach that we’re recommending and that you agree with this approach. Policies will be authorized by formal presentation to the Commission and will follow legal ordinance approval process. Procedures on the other hand which are the day-to-day working document, the Human Resources Director will recommend changes to the Administrator. The Administrator will approve or reject those changes. Deliverables. These are milestones and you’ll see a timeline coming up that is the last slide. This is our commitment in order to make this happen by the end of this year. Two phases of the deliverables. The first phase which we’re currently in is the policy phase. The consultant has drafted 75% of the policies he’s going to be recommending. HR has reviewed all of those. Legal has, this morning I said pending, they went over about half of the policies so we still need some input there. The sub-committee is meeting today and we’re discussing the policies. The department review will occur in July. The sub-committee will be presented the results on August 11, a final legal review will be done in August and we expect to present to the full Commission th on the 30 of August. Phase II the deliverables are as follows. We expect to start by September; if we can start earlier, we will. We will utilize the policies that have been approved and accepted by the Commission. HR will begin meetings and we will process this section by section so we can take advantage of all the prior work that was done. We have historical data and very good records on the efforts that Michelle and her team put together in the past in trying to modify this. So we’re going to be using their logic and reviewing it as well as the actual documents that currently exist. We will have meetings and I put down the times because we’re working from different time zones so we expect to have at least a minimum of a two hour meeting each week on Wednesday from one to three. Our consultant is moving out to the west coast. Legal reviews will be done as each section is completed so we’re not just going to dump everything on them at the last minute. We’re going to keep working closely with them so they can spread out their time and be able to review it as we’re going along. Final approval will be done with the Administrator. Progress meetings will be held monthly with the Administrator and monthly progress presentations will be given to the sub-committee. The target date for completion is December, 2016. She’s pushing me on here. The vetting method for procedures is we will start with current policies, take one section at a time, add, delete and modify the current policy. HR will review with the consultant, we’ll have a legal review, the Administrator will approve and then the final product will be published. One thing I want to really emphasize and this is kind of close to my heart in writing, rewriting and working with policies and procedures, the one thing I 3 have noticed is the best policies and procedures that exist are those that are a growing, living document. That there is some methodology in place that as things develop, you go and modify the polices or procedures. This is important because if no method is adopted, that procedure that we have worked on will become stale and outdated. Life moves on, laws are passed, things change. You can’t just sit there as a one-time shot, photograph and say here it is, this is going to last forever. It’s constantly changing and no person I’ve ever met can really foresee every possible issue that might come forward so what I recommend is that I be assigned to be responsible for keeping up with the changing laws, having a thorough understanding of the rationale for each section and how we wrote it. So we are the ones involved in the writing of it so our team is going to have that knowledge and this person will be asked to interpret policies when issues arise which were not originally considered. So that’s the gatekeeper. Assign a gatekeeper and I suggest that I be that gatekeeper since I am most involved with it. Second, adopt a method for documenting interpretations and updating. Procedural memos. Draft such a memo and then maintain a change file and I would suggest every five years we take that change file and rewrite the procedures manual. So that will update it consistently and that’s the key in my mind to a good procedure manual. Obviously approval will be for all changes and interpretations will go through an approval process, most likely through the Administrator or Deputy. Here is out timeline and it basically reflects what we’ve said and we hope to accomplish everything by (inaudible). Any questions? Mr. Lockett: I have a question on the changes. You said the Personnel Policies and Procedures Manual will be updated every five years but as you indicated from time to time there are changes. They might be, they may not be major or whatever but I’m going back to the military now. If we had a change you might be able to take a pen and notate it there or if it’s a whole page you could put a new page there and have an index or something in the front showing what it’s all about. In other words, you can look at the manual itself. It is always up to date but it may have obvious changes that have been made to it during the course. Have you experienced anything like that or do you think you – Mr. Loeser: Well, I was in the military for six years and I have seen other organizations do that. If another mechanism (inaudible) updated and I would be all for doing that if that’s what the sub-committee’s wishes are. Thank you, Mr. Loeser. Okay, the next thing on the agenda, Mr. Jonathan Boxer, Attorney, for the consultant’s presentation. Mr. Boxer: Good afternoon. Thank you for having me. For those of you who haven’t met me before, I’m Jonathan Boxer. I’m based out in California now. I’ve worked in employment and labor law for about 40 years with law firms and inside organizations. I’m trying to be retired now but Mike asked me to work with him on this. So my approach on drafting these proposed policies has been to first read the current policies and try to get an understanding of what the current practice is. I don’t profess to have a full understanding of that. I’ve read through it (inaudible) papers, had some meetings on my last visit here with some of the department heads, got some input from them on what issues they felt were important. I also applied what I think are best practices and bearing in mind what the legal requirements are for a variety of policies. Some policies have much more legal input than others. Other policies are much less prone to legal restriction and more prone to how the particular organization wants to drive its policies. So that’s what I tried to do. The last point before we get involved in these is 4 the so-called ban the box which is referred to as fair chance policy. In addition to just getting input from the department heads and looking at the current policy, I have reviewed the EEOC guidelines on this issue. They were first issued in 2012. Guidelines for those of you who are not familiar with these do not have the force of law but they do represent the federal government’s belief in how this issue should be addressed. I also looked over a variety of about half a dozen ordinances at state and local levels that dealt with this subject too to see what other jurisdictions are doing. There have been over the past ten years or so a few court decisions addressing this issue. There are three appellate court decisions in the United States that address this issue. I’ve read all of those and again, try to input all of that into coming up with a draft proposal. Mike has organized these proposals numerically but I think it’s probably wise to at least first address the fair chance proposal before people may have to leave or otherwise run out of steam. The structure of the proposals that I have come up with is to first provide a summary so if someone looks at it they know what this particular policy addresses. I’m talking about the structure of what I’ve come up with on draft proposals for all of the policies, a summary statement, what this policy addresses. Secondly, the actual policy itself that will have some narrative to it. Now by design these policies are not meant to have a lot of detail. They’re meant to express a broad policy decision by the commissioners. The details as Mike mentioned will be set forth when the policies are agreed upon in the procedure which will be picked up later in the year. It didn’t make much sense it seemed to us to start off drafting a lot of detailed procedures when we weren’t finalized in what the actual policy would be. Compliance responsibilities are set forth in Section 3 of the policies. These are the departments within the organization that would be responsible for implementing and carrying out these policies and in a majority of cases it’s going to be the HR function. The procedures to implement the policy again will be developed in conjunction with HR. There is a section on applicability. Each policy will state which category of employees it is applicable to. Finally, I structured in here (inaudible) where appropriate definitions and a revision history. This is similar to what Commissioner Lockett maybe was referring to that when a policy is finally adopted there will be an ongoing permanent record of any modifications, changes or additions to that policy so that people can go back and trace what the lineage of any policy is, maybe to see what changes were but also you may have issues that employee disputes come up that arose prior to the implementation of the current policy and you want to go back and see that. I haven’t put it in yet but I think we should ultimately also have a section within each policy which cross references either to other policies or to the particular procedures that would implement that policy, but those would be developed once the policies are finalized. So that’s the general structure of what we’ve proposed. With respect to the fair chance policy and by the way as I ramble on here if anybody has any questions don’t hesitate to throw a phone at me or otherwise ask some questions that usually when I talk for more than an hour or so I’m guaranteed to make at least two or three irrational statements per hour so don’t hesitate to call me on it. In terms of the fair chance policy just five minutes of background on this. You know when I first started practicing law and all that’s been involved in employment, most employers did not make inquiries into a person’s criminal record. Over time that inquiry became relatively standard on the employment application process. But bear in mind for a long time when that was going on there was no big data, there was no ability to access on a statewide, nationwide criminal records and in terms of what was inquired into there weren’t as many people who were caught up in the criminal justice system so the impact of these kind of inquiries had one, a lesser impact upon the population in general and two, there was limited ability to check on what employees provided in response to this inquiry. The past dozen years or so there has been a 5 huge increase in the number of employers making inquiries into applicants’ criminal records given the vast accumulation of data bases and the ability to access data bases all over the country there is now easy ability to determine whether applicants have been involved in any way, shape or form in the criminal justice system. In addition to that we’ve seen over the past twenty years or so a significant increase in the number of individuals who have been caught up in the criminal justice system. The EEOC took notice of that. That is part of the reason that they have promulgated these guidelines. A number of employers have modified their policies in this area if only because they’re finding difficulty getting employees who do not have any kind of criminal background record because so many people have been caught up in the criminal background process. The EEOC and various courts have addressed this issue and have also noted that minorities particularly African Americans and Hispanics, the males, have been caught up in the criminal justice system in disproportionate numbers and therefore if these policies are applied in an arbitrary rote disqualification process you will have the result of disqualifying a disproportionate number of African Americans and that has led to the changes that the EEOC and the courts are addressing. Those movements and those changes are reflected in the draft policy here. In general, what we’re proposing is that there not be any automatic disqualification for most jobs simply because an individual has a criminal background. Rather for most jobs the suggestion is is that this will be done within the HR function to provide consistency and perhaps weed out hiring managers who have disparate views on this subject. That HR would perform what I would call an individualized assessment. Essentially what that means is looking at details of the criminal background, when they happened, what they involved, the severity of the offense, what has been the individual’s record since the conviction and also getting from the applicant his or her version of what led to the conviction and possibly what their behavior and experience has been to address whatever problems led to the conviction since they’ve gotten out of prison assuming there was a prison term. And only with that information for most jobs can HR make a determination is this criminal conviction relevant to a particular job for which the individual is being considered. If it is relevant and only if it is relevant, then that information would be disclosed to the hiring manager so that the hiring manager could have input as to whether or not that criminal conviction should be considered in the hiring process. This data we’ve proposed or this information we’ve proposed will be collected at the beginning of the application process from all applicants. But we’re proposing that it be collected along with the demographic data that all applicants are asked for. So you’ve got a job application. People are asked for their education, their prior jobs, licenses that they may need that are relevant for the position, all of that data would go to the hiring manager but the demographic data asks people about race, sex, etc. for applicant collection purposes and they will also be asked at that point have they had any prior criminal convictions. The responses to that demographic information request and the criminal background request would be sent only to HR. So initially the hiring manager would not have access to that data and if they determined that it was not relevant, then the hiring manager would never see it. That way we would set up a process that screens out any consideration by hiring managers and criminal background information when it’s not relevant to a particular position. To use extreme examples when you and I suspect you do have positions where some government employees have access to vulnerable groups, maybe elderly individuals or maybe youngsters, for those people we would want to ensure that we wouldn’t be placing people into those positions that have had a history of abuse of those types of individuals or any violence in general. In contrast you may have a job where a person is working by themselves, doesn’t have access to other people, doesn’t have access to a lot of records, that person’s 6 criminal background record probably would have very limited relevance to if any and we would task HR using a set of guidelines that we would develop to screen out those individuals or screen out those situations. Do you have a question? Mr. Hasan: I do. You made mention about the division where a certain part goes to HR and a certain part goes to a manager, where the demographics would go to the HR Department. So are we still seeing the question on the application then? Mr. Boxer: The question will be asked at the beginning of the application process. It’s my understanding that you’re not using paper anymore. This is all done electronically. Am I correct on that? Mr. Loeser: Yes. Mr. Boxer: And that we have the ability, in fact we do it now, when I say we, you people, do it now that we make these inquiries about demographic data, that inquiry is part of the electronic application process, the responses to those inquiries are not sent to the hiring manager. Similarly, the response to the fair chance question, “Do you have any criminal background?” would be collected initially, collected electronically, not be sent to the hiring manager, only sent off to HR. Mr. Hasan: Okay, second question. You made mention of a person offense, the main offense, but you said what have they done since prior since that offense was committed. What time are you looking at that? What do you think is appropriate to consider hiring a person if you want to see what they have done since? I mean if I get out, to make clear if I get out this week then two weeks later I’m looking (inaudible) that there’s enough time to make an assessment or do you have a timeline or are you not (inaudible) timeline when you say that? Mr. Boxer: Well, we haven’t put these in the policy. Those would go in I would suggest in the internal guidelines that HR would be using to assess whether or not any criminal background is relevant to even be sent to the hiring manger. You have issues do you measure time from the time of conviction or the time from release from either jail or prison. Now if someone’s been in jail for 40 years for whatever they’ve committed, one can probably make at least a reasonable assessment, this is just my opinion, that their propensity to engage in similar criminal conduct is lessened. Now you can conduct studies on these issues and a couple of the courts that have addressed this issue have chastised employers for arbitrary measurements as to when they are going to consider or not consider an individual based on the amount of time that has passed since he is either released from prison or incarceration or the commission of the offense. It would be interesting to see if there are any studies to show that recidivism increases, rather decreases given the flight of time from the commission of a particular offense and if so, at what rate. I don’t know the answers to those questions but I think we could look into that and get that kind of data to formulate the guidelines for HR to screen out consideration by the hiring manager of a particular criminal activity. Mr. Hasan: Thank you. 7 Mr. Boxer: There are some jobs, however, that because of federal or state licensing or regulatory requirements would preclude an individual who has a criminal background either forever or maybe for a period of time from taking a license or certification that is essential to perform a job in question. Law enforcement is the obvious one that comes to mind. For those positions we will disqualify an individual up front in the application process. There is no point in letting an individual go through the application process, get to the (inaudible) interview and then say whoa we just now discovered that three years ago you committed the x, y, z offense that disqualifies you from being in an a, b, c job. Thanks for playing but please go away. That’s wasting everybody’s time. There will be a certain number of jobs, and we’ll identify them in the procedures before this is all finalized, for which that kind of strict disqualification process will be applicable. It’s my anticipation that those might be a minority of the jobs in question in this government organization. Mr. Lockett: Am I understanding you to say that all of the applications will go to the HR Department, the HR Department will filter them and send them to the hiring manager. However, when the HR Department gets one, if the position that’s being advertised, this person because of their record, doesn’t qualify, nothing as relates to (inaudible) will go to a hiring manager? Mr. Boxer: I don’t know if we can work it mechanically like that. I mean I guess in theory what we could do is for the jobs that require licenses or certifications for which a criminal background or criminal record would disqualify them that nothing would be sent to the hiring manager from those applicants until the HR point of contact would verify that they don’t have criminal disqualification. Mr. Lockett: For example, if a position for a fireman is advertised, this person applies for it. All the record goes to the HR Department and when you review it, you see this person was convicted and served time for being an arsonist, that’s not going to a hiring manager. That’s going to be dead on arrival at HR, is that correct? Mr. Boxer: It should be, yeah. Mr. Lockett: Okay, thank you. Mr. Brazzell: We have the ability to do that much like we at the staff level screen out applicants that are, that do not meet the minimum qualifications. Mr. Boxer: These would be incorporated in the guidelines that we would incorporate into the procedures, (inaudible) public document and have a guideline so that it would be solely within HR and they would utilize those guidelines before they would release the application to be considered by the hiring manager. The convicted arsonist for the Fire position would never go. On the other hand, possibly if, and I’m speculating here, if a person applies for a job as a grass cutter and they’ve been convicted of arson ten years ago and they’ve had no recidivism in that area, you could consider them to be a lawn mower. I mean what are they going to burn at that point? So that’s the process of what we’re proposing. If you want and the current policy has for a number of convictions specified timeframes from either the conviction or the release from incarceration during which a person, whichever is later, during which a person applicant cannot 8 be considered for (inaudible), the advantage of that is consistency. He will not have a hiring manager say well, I’ll hire a guy two years after he has been released from jail for murder and another hiring manager say oh no, I want to see forty years of good behavior for a convicted murderer before I’ll consider him for hire. So you have that problem with potential inconsistency plus those kind of restrictions are exactly what the EEOC guidelines say are improper. They want an individualized assessment in each particular case to ensure that there is an assessment as to whether a particular person’s background should or should not disqualify them for a particular (inaudible). Mr. Lockett: The Mayor has a question or statement, whatever. Mr. Boxer: We think it’s better not to go with the arbitrary cut off but we are going to have that HR review – Mr. Mayor: I’m enlightened. This has been a very enlightening conversation. I do want th to go back to something that the commissioner from the 6 asked with regards to our current application process. The genesis behind this conversation is one, that little check box where you’re banning the box, fundamentally that’s how this conversation began and the associated. Since we do this electronically, it’s my understanding that we can move that off of the application pretty quickly which is how we started the conversation and that was the one original premise. Number two, the way you’re describing this individualized assessment is very encouraging because it provides consistency. I think without question that is the direction the sub-committee and the Chairman want to go in. I had not heard that before and thus we’re here today and I think that’s really what could be a model for other communities as well because I’ve not heard that before in terms of establishing the assessment and saying here’s a metric that you will use but again the foundational premise is that stigma associated with if I check this box, then immediately in people’s mind I’m disqualified because I go from having checked the box to now not having an opportunity to explain what I’ve done or even if I do get a chance to explain what I’ve done, I’m still summarily file 13 and kicked out. So I would hope as the committee continues its good work that we go back to that because you’re going to do background checks on everybody. Mr. Boxer: Well, we’re only going to do background checks, it’s my understanding that this is consistent with current practice, we’re only going to do background checks on either the ultimate candidate or the (inaudible) candidate. You may get 50 people applying for a job. It’s going to be whittled down to one or two. Those are the person or persons that we’re going to do the background check on. I think it’s both expensive and time consuming to do criminal background checks on all 50. To address another one of your points though I do think it’s important to ask the question up front “What is your criminal background?” I think it’s important also to tell that individual on the form a positive response to this inquiry will not automatically disqualify you from most positions. We might even want to add on there the positions that would be the exception that certain positions by definition will be a cause for automatic disqualification. Law enforcement might be one of them and there might be a few others. For most of the positions you can make that individualized assessment. That process of individualized assessment will include an opportunity for the applicant to explain the situation. I got involved in this, I pled guilty to something because I didn’t think I did it but the prosecutor 9 wanted to charge me with 14 different counts and my lawyer advised me to plead guilty to one misdemeanor and that’s why I did it. That might be an explanation. It’s important to give that applicant the opportunity to explain what went on. The other thing that is in the current policy is an automatic disqualification for drug convictions for a period of time. And again my recommendation would be that there not be an automatic disqualification on that. The drug laws in this country are changing. I suspect Georgia will not be in the forefront of that process but I did note that California yesterday put it on the ballot that they’re going to legalize the recreational use of marijuana. If that passes that’ll mean that one-fifth of the country’s population is covered by recreational marijuana and I’m not trying to take a position one way or the other on any of these drug uses I’m just trying to point out that change is occurring in this country on many issues involving criminal offenses and we need to individually assess applicants who have criminal backgrounds to make sure that we’re not disqualifying otherwise qualified candidates for positions with the government. Mr. Lockett: Mr. Boxer since you brought up marijuana, Commissioner Frantom has a question. Mr. Frantom: My question is actually for Mr. Loeser. Don’t we already do this individual assessment currently? You mentioned that we’re hiring a convicted felon next week as a meter reader. We already have other convicted felons, I mean I’m just trying to understand, we’re already doing it, what’s the point of taking off the box? Mr. Boxer: Yeah, the box has never been used. As far as I have been here and as far as my staff has been here it’s never been used as a determinant as to whether or not to pass the individual for final (inaudible) consideration so it’s not being a bar from employment. An automatic bar. Now what we don’t do is we don’t go and do that individual assessment. We just take the information and pass it on if he’s the final candidate. Then we do the background check and at that point we’d make a determination but it’s not done prior to that. Mr. Frantom: And the PPM states that within five years of your last conviction you’re not eligible for hiring as well? So you can have a safe measure in there? Mr. Loeser: There’s a list somewhere twelve months but it depends on the violation. Mr. Boxer: It’s also that period of time from either the conviction or the release from incarceration whichever is later. That’s what the current policy states and it would be our recommendation to go away from that kind of arbitrary policy. Mr. Lockett: You know whether we use it or not I think it’s a good thing for us to incorporate and let everybody know that we’re a participant in ban the box. I just returned from the Georgia Municipal Association conference and this is one of the things I was able to talk about because one of the councilmen I had heard that the Governor or somebody had signed off on ban the box and I was able to stand up and say hey, we’re doing that in Augusta. That’s a good drawing card, not saying we’re trying to get all the ex-felons here but it’s just a good thing to do. 10 Mr. Boxer: When people use the phrase ban the box, virtually all of the, and I think I’ve read most of the legislation on this issue, virtually all of it does not ban the inquiry. What it bans is the automatic rejection because of a positive response to the inquiry. Virtually all of the legislation, the EEOC guidance and the court decisions recognize that the hiring process is essentially a risk assessment process. You get a limited amount of information about an applicant, you see him in a 45-minute interview maybe and you’re trying to get your head around the idea is this person a good risk to succeed or fail for the job responsibilities at the government institution or other organization. The criminal background record is what the courts and the guidelines are saying is, can be in that risk assessment process but it shouldn’t be an automatic disqualification for most jobs. That’s kind of the framework for all of this. Mr. M. Williams: And I think that’s the biggest problem is the stigma is out there and when you check the box that’s automatic disqualification. That stigma is going to be there for a long time until people understand differently. But we have always and I think every business may not ask you and I said to the Mayor and other people if you want to take it off the application which we don’t have paper applications no more, I ain’t got no problem with that. But you’ve got to do the inquiry (inaudible) especially when they are looking at the finalists. You’ve got to ask those questions. There’s no way you can say and I’m just using the statement of ban the box and say okay, you ain’t got to worry about it if you went to jail for whatever or whenever. It’s going to be discussed in this government especially when you’re hiring for seniors, children, different scenario, so just that stigma that’s out there about ban the box. We’ve always either talked about it at the initial point or at the finalist point, but you’ve got to talk about it. And so it doesn’t mean a disqualification if you say yes, I’ve been incarcerated or yes, I’ve been convicted. You ought to have the conversation as to what happened and be reasonable about what did happen. I think that’s something we’ve been doing all the time. People understand that life changes, situations happen and you need to talk about those. Mr. Boxer: Well, I think we try to address that by in terms of changing the stigma or changing the perception by one, expressly putting into the policy that for most positions prior criminal background record will not be an automatic disqualification. We’re also going to put in right next to the box so that when a person is asked to check the box they will also be told that this will not be for most positions an automatic disqualification of your application for employment. So they will be told that right when they’re addressing the issue. There is one point I forgot to address and I don’t know that it is an issue here. It has been an issue in some other people and organizations that I’ve worked with. It’s our recommendation that arrest records as opposed to conviction records not be inquired about. That there should be no inquiry and the inquiry about criminal conviction should expressly state that we’re only looking for convictions not arrests. The practical reality of arrests is that when you’re arrested, it’s just an allegation and if you don’t get convicted, it means those allegations have never been proven. We as an organization for our recommendation should not be considering those events absent a conviction. Now there is a caveat to that and that is that even though you’re not going to ask about arrests, if facts come to a hiring manager’s or HR’s attention relating to an arrest that is somehow relevant to the hiring decision the underlying facts can be considered. This is an extreme example. If somebody is accused of a violent crime and by all accounts, newspaper account, it seems more likely than not that they did engage in some violent activity but they’re not convicted because of some technical legal issue, maybe there was an improper search 11 warrant executed and all the evidence has to be thrown out against them so they couldn’t be convicted, it is not improper for an organization to consider those underlying facts even if the arrest did not give rise to the conviction. That is an unusual circumstance. The policy specifically states however, or the proposed policy states that no inquiries will be made regarding arrests. Mr. Mayor: Mr. Boxer, I’m going to go back to a statement that Chairman Lockett, Chairman Williams (inaudible) the same issue and that’s the stigma associated with the box and I’m going to state here at this spot that I’m very happy with this conversation. In Ferguson, Missouri there are 21,000 residents. 16,000 of the 21,000 residents of Ferguson, Missouri have been arrested and/or convicted of something. That’s 80% of the residents of Ferguson, Missouri. Now I’m framing that backdrop. That’s certainly not Augusta but one could reasonably take a leap of faith and believe that when I go to apply for a job or if I’m just walking down the street, I’ve already got this halo over me and it’s not such a positive halo. And then you translate that to Augusta, Georgia where we’ve got individuals who will come and apply. Your individualized assessment is spot on; it is the consistency that I think makes this government better. But I think without question going back to the whole narrative around, well, just leave the box there but then highlight. At the end of the day people who come and apply for jobs, they’re not going to look at the Policies and Procedures Manual that will summarily adopted by this sub-committee and in the days ahead by the full Commission. They’re not going to get that opportunity. They’re going to be between one meal that they just had, one residence that they just had and a new community that they’re now in that they’re going to be looking for a new lease on life. And when opportunity presents this government, this sub-committee with at a minimum at least immediately removing that stigma but without question to Commissioner Marion Williams’ point you still have to ask the questions. And that’s what your individualized assessment allows us to do, to ask the questions, to get that background so that in full faith and confidence it’s able to be understood and be expressed and whoever the hiring authority is of record, they can then make that determination but with consistency whether it’s Engineering, Utilities, Parks and Rec, whether it’s Central Services, whether it’s HR, whether it’s the Administrator’s Office. I think that’s the thing that I think is important when you talk about the individual assessment component and you’ve had the conversations from the EEOC perspective job relatedness is of key importance in that. I don’t think we want to lose sight of those things as we move forward. Evidence of rehabilitation in the state of Georgia, individuals are being released from all institutions of correction with certificates now that say I’ve done these things, I’ve gotten this experience and now the state of Georgia stands behind me saying that I am not if given an opportunity going to reoffend. So for us to level the playing field and remove that stigma I think certainly makes it even stronger as we move forward and it’s a (inaudible) play. Mr. Lockett: Mr. Boxer, the HR Department needs to know if a person has been convicted of an offense. They need to know. It’s not necessary the hiring manager know but there needs to be some mechanism where this information of offenses is relayed to the HR Department because the HR Department has to make an initial screen. The way I look at fair chance policy, ban the box or whatever, is to give a person who’s been convicted an opportunity to discuss his or her conviction and also discuss his or her qualifications as it relates to work. Now the people, any potential employees are not necessarily hired by the HR Department. They are done by the hiring managers and so forth. And so it’s difficult for me to see how we could 12 have anybody to submit an application for employment without somebody knowing what their past record is. But at the same time not using the past record as a necessary means to disqualify them unless of course it is for a certain type of position. Now you can say ban the box but if you have the box on there but you’ve got certain stipulations you haven’t really banned the box. The box is still there but HR has to have some kind of way to have that information that’s not going to be on the application. I don’t know if it’s possible or not but that’s what we would need. Mr. Boxer: It is electronically possible. The electronic application already has these inquiries about demographic information about race, age, sex. None of that information, you’re required to ask that now by the federal government, you’re required to get that information for applicant analysis purposes. None of that information is currently asked for; none of it goes to the hiring manager. It’s mechanically, electronically, and I’m not an expert in this, but I believe that it’s mechanically and electronically easy to do to add into that demographic section another inquiry about the criminal background which will not go to the hiring manager, will only go to HR. The process as we envision it HR would make that initial assessment as to whether or not the individual is disqualified because they’re applying for a fireman’s job and they have been convicted of arson or the conviction is completely unrelated either by nature of time or by nature of the conviction related to the job in question, the arsonist 30 years ago and the hiring of that person to be a groundskeeper or whether additional information will be needed in which case HR would contact that individual and make that individualized assessment part of which would include giving the individual the opportunity to provide whatever information they have. Only when HR has vetted that individual only for the criminal background purpose. You know you mentioned earlier qualifications for the job. I don’t envision this process as in any way taking away from the hiring manager’s ability to say applicant A is or is not qualified for the job because they don’t have the skills, the background or the experience, etc. That’s all in the hiring manager’s department. HR would just say, yes, this person’s application can go to the hiring manager or cannot. Mr. Hasan: Mr. Boxer, to the Chairman’s point he asked about if the box is still there, you have really not banned the box. From a legal perspective by the box being there, does that define and take into account some of the things that you, the language that you say put around there for questioning purposes in knowing (inaudible) to HR about the person’s criminal background, are we still in the range of ban the box (inaudible) have to rule did he ban the box from a legal perspective? Mr. Boxer: It’s not the issue of a box; you can take the box off. You can ask the question, “Have you been convicted of any criminal activities? If so, please list nature of offense, date and jurisdiction.” So there’s no more box. Maybe that cosmetically looks better. From a legal perspective, I’m very confident that even the EEOC guidelines which is probably the most liberal on this issue allows employers to make inquiries about prior criminal convictions. Where the EEOC regulations deviate from prior practice, they say what did you do with that? They say don’t use it as an automatic disqualification. If you’ve got it make an assessment. Is it relevant to the job? How long ago did it occur? What is the person’s prior background? And that all will be done through HR with the guidelines for them to, so they wouldn’t have one HR person going off on a wild tangent. It would be guidelines that they could work off of. I would envision creating a matrix of the kind of convictions, date of conviction, 13 nature of job and there would be something HR would have to work from so they wouldn’t be inventing the wheel every time they confronted one of these situations. Mr. Hasan: So ban the box is a political term. Mr. Boxer: I think we ought to ban the box, ban the box the term. That’s why we came up with the term fair chance which I think more accurately reflects what I think you’re trying to do which is to say that there are people out there that made a mistake but they are otherwise good people. They’ve demonstrated that they are no longer a reasonable threat to at least at work, and we’re going to get some of them, if they have skills worth hiring, then hire them and if not, we won’t. But the criminal conviction in those cases won’t be a relevant factor. Mr. Hasan: Mr. Loeser, right now the division in terms of where the information goes one goes to HR and one goes to the manager, is that currently happening? Mr. Loeser: Andraea, would you address that? Ms. Herrin: What was the question, Commissioner? Mr. Hasan: The question was, Mr. Boxer was saying that one way to do that was that from that information about me as a potential employee that some of it would go HR which would be my criminal background, ethnicity as well as other information would go to the manager who is attempting to hire me. Is that currently happening or does it all end up in one place? Ms. Herrin: That information stays in HR. It is not released to the hiring manager. Mr. Hasan: That’s everything at this point? Ms. Herrin: That’s correct. Mr. Hasan: Okay, so now my question is to Ms. Allen. In terms of what’s being proposed can you create a system where that information where that information would divide itself? Ms. Allen: That’s what’s currently happening now with the Neogov system. Certain information stays at HR and certain goes on when they reference those jobs to the respective hiring managers. That information is not exactly everything that HR sees. They do ask the question about a conviction on there now but that question can be easily removed or can stay depending on what’s determined or what’s decided. Mr. Boxer: It wouldn’t be removed; it would be moved. Ms. Allen: That’s right, exactly. The hiring manager won’t get to see it but the Human Resources Department would be able to utilize that information in their screening process. 14 Mr. Hasan: So you currently have that or you can create that vehicle? Ms. Allen: No, we currently have it. It would just have to be modified to be added to the data that they actually look at as opposed to what the hiring manager looks at. Mr. Boxer: Just to be clear those demographic inquiries that are made are required. All employers are required to find out what their applicant pool is, what their race, sex, age, etc. so they can put together an affirmative action plan. Mr. Lockett: If you had indicated early on that we’re not going to talk about ban the box we’re going to talk about fair chance policy we’d have been much further along. Mr. Boxer: I would add also that this policy on modifying what the current practice is will not only benefit individuals, I would argue that it would benefit the government because you’d widen the pool of people that you could potentially hire from and potentially get a better work force. Mr. Mayor: Mr. Boxer, that last statement I agree with that. But everything that’s being discussed does not remove that stigma whether it’s a term of art, i.e. banning the box, if it’s colorful, at the end of the day when Pookie comes and applies for the job and he has been out, he has not reoffended but he knows that this hangs over his head and he applies electronically and he has to in all honesty check that box. The stigma still stands. Unsolicited I sat down at 10:15 next to Terry Elam, President of Augusta Technical College. I didn’t ask for the conversation. He simply said what ya’ll are trying to do we’ve already done. On our applications at Augusta Technical College pursuant to the executive order from the state, we removed that. We have a process in place in which we are allowing folks to apply and it works and it allows folks to come without holding their head down, without having the stigma associated and if we’re talking about doing something other than that, which I agree 100% with the individual assessment process, I think we all agree with that. You have to have a metric, a tool to weigh that’s meaningful to be able to ascertain and get that information so that you can make decisions that are relevant to your workforce and to the general public. I agree with that. But again if we’re not going to put information on the job application itself as it relates to exclusions and include that information in the descriptions, if there aren’t targeted exemptions and that maybe part of your thought process in terms of overall analysis and policy, I think without question what we’re saying is let’s just keep doing what we’re doing and we’ll add an individual assessment which based on what I’ve heard from HR, we’re not doing that today from an individual assessment standpoint. Mr. Loeser: We’re waiting until the actual applicant is selected. At that point we look at the criminal background so – Mr. Mayor: Which is what you would expect, that’s when you would do the background check so that eliminates the notion that we’re not going to do background checks on anybody. I agree with that. You still want to continue to do that but as I said, John Doe doesn’t know that that’s going to happen. 15 Mr. Boxer: First of all we’re going to put on the application form in this section, we’re going to specifically state in bold type 10 point type a criminal conviction or a criminal record will not result in the automatic disqualification of an applicant except for certain positions. That could be put up there. Secondly, we’re not having a box that they check it off. Remember, on an employment application people are asked a lot of questions. Why did you leave your last employer? Were you discharged? If you were discharged, what for? (inaudible) a negative statement (inaudible). I would agree with you it’s not as much as criminal perhaps but one can say I was discharged last month for insubordination versus a DUI that I had 40 years ago. It’s probably a greater statement for being discharged for insubordination a month ago. So they are going to be asked a bunch of questions. I am not an expert in communications. You probably have communication experts in the organization. You probably have radio stations, TV stations and newspapers around here eager to publicize that type of – Mr. M. Williams: We have plenty of those. Mr. Boxer: Still the word would get out that this organization is not going to automatically disqualify you. Mr. M. Williams: That statement when you’re talking about Ferguson, Missouri and how people (inaudible) about a job and all that work, let me say there are a lot of registered voters who don’t vote because they’ve been told at one point that you can’t vote again. There are so many people both black and white who have been told you can’t vote no more. They don’t vote because there’s a stigma that’s been planted out there over many, many years. It ain’t going to change overnight. It’s going to take time. So those things are real and they exist. We need to face those things and you’re going to have to ask those things especially in the government area when in the private sector you can get by with it. Mr. Lockett: Being a former federal investigator, I used to do security investigations and you could look at a resume or an application and pretty much, 90% of the time tell when a person has been incarcerated because you look for past employment. All of a sudden you’ve got a three-year gap of employment. There are all kind of warning things that show that you have a problem here. So just the box alone, I think the fair chance is appropriate because no one is disqualified early on except those positions that require certain things. They have an opportunity to sit down and talk but at some time that information is going to have to be provided because if they lie about it, they may get the job, they may keep the job for 20 years and all of a sudden they’re in line for a promotion which requires an investigation and if they lied on the application, that’s still grounds for termination. They’ve got to tell the truth. Mr. Boxer: And that last point is in the draft policy. You’re not operating a factory here where people just bend metal. You can have people in all sorts of backgrounds in that environment. You’ve got people going into people’s homes, onto people’s property, taking care of vulnerable groups, handling money, handling credit card numbers, all of which if a person has a particular background, you may make a reasonable judgment that you don’t want someone with a particular background in those kinds of jobs. So I don’t think it’s illegitimate, in fact I think it’s very appropriate for the organization to make these kinds of inquiries with the caveat 16 that we’re not going to use them when they’re not relevant and that HR will be the central data point to make sure that’s applied consistently and in an even-handed manner. Mr. Sias: I was a little disappointed when we’re talking about fair chance and we introduced Pookie into the room. I really sincerely see that as a stigma right there. I think we need to leave Pookie out to the room because – Mr. M. Williams: He ain’t going away now. Mr. Boxer: I’m going to talk about the other policies if no one has any further questions about the fair chance policy. Ms. Jackson: Just as a matter of procedure, Mr. Chairman, are you going to ask for approval to move this forward to the full Commission at this point or do you want to do that later? Mr. Lockett: Just this particular section? Ms. Jackson: Yes, just this section. Mr. Lockett: My recommendation would be that we bring it before the Commission the entire thing, not in increments. The whole thing and vote it up or down. And if we’ve got anything we want to change, we can discuss it. Mr. Boxer: Okay, proposal number one. The proposed absence policy. The key change here from the current policy or practice is to make it clear that there is no right to work at home or have an alternative work location. Rather Augusta will abide by its obligations to accommodate individuals who for a variety of reasons, it would be religious, it could be disability, how (inaudible) to or need to work at a different schedule or a different location and we’ll attempt to accommodate that but the law and practice only says that we have to accommodate that to a reasonable degree and to the extent that you have jobs that require what I phrase as hands-on positions where they have to be working either at the organization’s facility or at sites throughout the jurisdiction. They can’t work from home. And that’s the major change that will be proposed in this policy. Any questions? Ms. Jackson: I just wanted to make a comment. I just wanted to make clear that we on a staff level will likely amend this to some degree because many of our employees don’t work 37½ hours. We may have those in the public safety sector and others who may have some different work hours so I just wanted to put that out there. Mr. M. Williams: Based on what the Administrator just said, will that make any significant difference? Ms. Jackson: Like Fire, for instance, they have different work hours, and 911 and other public safety personnel as well so I think your overriding concern, Mr. Boxer, as you addressed this had to do with the idea that you work at your workplace as opposed to working at home and 17 things like that which is still relevant but I just want to make sure that everybody understands that a full-time employee may be a 37.5-hour employee who maybe works different hours. Mr. Boxer: Each department director may establish alternative work schedules as necessary for their department so I think that would address that concern. Mr. Hasan: I think you would make the exception of the Fire Department or those employees like that that the 37.5 hours does not pertain to them. I think it is best to put that caveat in there as opposed to each department. Mr. Lockett: I would like to get a consensus of the sub-committee. I indicated earlier that I thought we should vote on the entire package at one time but I know that each one of my colleagues has some question about that so I want to get a general consensus of everybody on the sub-committee. How do you want to treat this because I was under the impression that everything in here was going to go into effect at the same time? I chaired the sub-committee that did the personnel policy and procedures manual several years ago and that’s what they did. We did the whole thing at one time. Do ya’ll want to do it in tidbits or do the whole package at one time or what? Mr. M. Williams: My personal opinion is that we need to massage this and look at it and dot the I’s and cross the t’s. There may be some questions; we need to read this and come back and I want to feel comfortable about it. I don’t want to vote on it and then say well, I didn’t look at that part. Mr. Lockett: I’m in agreement with you on that. Mr. Mayor: Ms. Jackson, do we have a telecommuting policy? Mr. Boxer: I would envision that the telecommuting issue would be handled as a procedure under the hours of work or absence policy. Policy two, affirmative action. Should be pretty non-controversial. This is a legal obligation that all organizations who receive federal funds have. This basically just incorporates the obligations that the organization has. Mr. Lockett: Do you think we have anything here that you think is not 100% (inaudible)? Mr. Boxer: Number three. Complaint resolution. It’s my understanding that the enabling legislation for the creation of this jurisdiction mandates that unlawful harassment and unlawful discrimination issues be addressed in a designated complaint procedure under the auspices of the Compliance Department. So those have to be segregated out and put into a separate process. I would suggest that all other employment related complaints be funneled into a single complaint process. This policy does not set forth what that actual process would be. I think it’s more efficient to have a single process for all employment-related complaints. Now the process that they would utilize does not have to be the same. Somebody complaining about a discharge may get a greater series of due process rights than someone complaining that they didn’t get the amount of pay raise they should have gotten. But I do think it’s more efficient to 18 have a single process. That’s what this policy proposes. In the scope there’s a number of issues that are specifically outside the policy either for legal reasons or for procedural reasons. For example, while we want to give individuals the ability to say a particular policy or procedure was applied improperly to me, we don’t want to give employees, I suggest, the ability to say this policy is no good. I’m protesting the policy. Employees don’t have the right to protest policies or procedures. They do have the right to protest the application of those to them and if they’re alleging unlawful discrimination or unlawful harassment under those policies and procedures, we’d have to go off into the complaint procedure run by the Compliance Department. That’s a general outline of what I’m proposing here. The details of what you’d actually adopt remain to be discussed. At the meetings with the department directors last month I threw out the idea would people want to consider some kind of dispute resolution process either on a mandatory basis or a voluntary basis. That remains to be discussed after you adopt the policy. Alternatively, we can have different procedures or different policies for different types of disputes or for different categories of employees. SES employees. Do you want to have a different procedure for them or not? Mr. Lockett: Yes. Mr. M. Williams: If this policy was established, who would you recommend that those persons appeal to or who would do that? Mr. Boxer: If I had my druthers, excluding the issues that had to be addressed under Compliance, I would say that if an employee has an employment dispute their initial address should go to their department manager. Have an informal meeting and if it works, it settles the dispute and you’re done. If not, it goes on to a second step. The second step in my mind would go to somebody in HR who was not involved in the dispute in question. Now HR has enough people in the department that I suspect they could find people who are not involved in the dispute in question. If I’m an employee and I’m getting fired and I know that HR manager A was consulted by my department manager in making that decision to fire me, I don’t want HR manager A reviewing my appeal. But there is probably an HR manager B who could address that issue. So the second step would be to go to HR. The third step would be in my mind to some kind of, I guess the Administrator, or a senior manager within the organization to make a final internal decision regarding the appropriateness of the particular employment action in question. Mr. Lockett: Mr. Boxer, let me interrupt you. You said a key word. You said final decision. The buck stops with the Administrator. The governing body is not involved in the personnel process at all. We are excluded from that by reason so we should not be involved in that. If they don’t like the decision that the Administrator said, the next and final step would be to go to the courts. There is nowhere in our current policy and I hope it doesn’t change where the governing body is involved in the personnel process. Mr. Boxer: I would agree with that. If I led you to believe otherwise, I apologize. Mr. Lockett: No, I was agreeing with what you said. But I just added a little on to it. 19 Mr. M. Williams: Not that the elected official should be involved, I’m not suggesting that, but I asked for your opinion and you gave me what you thought how the process should work. We’ve got a personnel appeal board that is still here so we try to put a policy together that’s going to be effective, that’s going to work. I don’t want to have to come back and do this again. It was no good when we approved it and if we don’t ask those questions not to get anybody involved but we don’t lay it out, we’re going to end up back at the same place we are. I agree. We send a lot of stuff to our attorneys. I disagree with a lot of stuff they handle. They’ve been on both sides of the fence on a lot of issues. Those things need to be put out and explained so I can feel comfortable about voting on the issue that’s going to affect 2700, 2800 employees. Mr. Boxer: I think that the goal of a complaint process should be one, to create a fair process to adjudicate the dispute and two, have the perception of being fair and if you have a manager in that appeal process who is involved in the original decision, even if that manager can somehow be fair, there will be a perception of unfairness. I would also suggest that commissioners, elected officials, don’t have the ability to be objective so I think you want to have a designated chain up through the hierarchy for the organization hierarchy and then ultimately as you said the person can go to court and as a decision for another day, whether you want to try to implement some form of alternative process after the dispute exits the internal complaint procedure do you want to have an alternative process rather than court. And that can be mandatory or voluntary. Mr. Hasan: Mr. Boxer, there are exceptions here in my mind and I can stand corrected around the issue of employees, SES level employees, answer directly to the Commission and you’re talking about the deputy directors, I think we have some of them as well. Is that the exception to the rule? Ms. Jackson: The department directors are all SES employees so they would also be excluded. Mr. Brazzell: If I might make one comment and an item we need to make note of at this point is to talk, come back and have the committee and the commission talk about the future, whether you’re going to a Personnel Board in the system or not because the way it’s set up right now is that you have the administrative steps Mr. Boxer described absent the Administrator and then if the employee isn’t happy he or she can move to the Personnel Board and if that decision is felt not to be happy he or she can come back to the Administrator so it’s a little bit of an awkward process there in terms of the role of the Personnel Board and where it fits in and do we keep it and so forth so we’ll just make note of that as staff so you can talk about it as we move forward. Mr. Boxer: To address that point and we do address it in the discipline process reading through the policy manual for this process of allowing people to, not allowing, requiring that individuals be given written notice of the intent to discipline and keeping them around while that process works through to its end I think creates problems particularly in termination situations. I mean to me it seems that there are more bad things that could happen than good things if you allow a person employee who is potentially going to be discharged to remain while his or her appeal or concerns are heard. There is a potential for sabotage, there is the potential for harm to 20 other employees, possibly people trying to (inaudible) witnesses. There is the potential that a person’s presence in the workplace may be threatening or harassing to other people so while I think it’s important and I put it in the policy that employees be advised of what they’re being accused of I didn’t require that it be done in writing. If any department manager wants to do it in writing, they could and one could argue that it’s a good practice to put it in writing because then there isn’t any dispute about what was said. The down side of that is the minute you put it in writing it’s cast in concrete and if you get additional information, you may not be able to use that additional information to support the alternate discipline decision. So while I think it’s important that people be told what they’re being accused of or what they’ve allegedly done wrong and that they be given the opportunity to respond to that before any final decision is made, I think particularly in potential termination situations I would reject the current practice you have of allowing employees to remain in the workplace for I think this eight-day period while they get to respond to the notice of intent to discipline and then a further period of time before the response to that is made. But I’ve tried to address that in the discipline process. Mr. Lockett: Would you recommend that they be placed on paid administrative leave during the interim? Mr. Boxer: You could do that. It costs money and it’s a policy decision. One could argue that it’s fair to do that. I would argue that if we think that an employee poses a risk to the organization that they be suspended pending the outcome of the investigation. If as a result of the investigation that it is concluded that they did nothing wrong they’d be reinstated and given back pay which is essentially the back side of administrative leave with pay. On the other hand, if the investigation concludes that they did something wrong, that penalty might be a suspension or it might be discharge in which case you haven’t thrown away money on a person who did something wrong. Mr. Lockett: If you suspend someone based on a suspicion and you find out that they, even if you’re (inaudible) then that gives them some kind of grounds to possibly want to sue you because if you suspend somebody, whether this person is innocent or not, that statement is going to be there for a long time. There are going to be people in the workforce that say yeah, he or she was guilty but got away with it. Mr. Boxer: Well, this law, anybody can sue for anything. This is America. I’ve seen virtually no litigation on the issue that a person is suspended pending the outcome of the investigation. The investigation later says they didn’t do anything wrong. You reinstate them. You give them back pay. Anything in their file relating to that issue is removed and destroyed. I don’t see any basis for meritorious litigation at that point. Mr. Lockett: But the thing about it though while this person is suspended without pay he or she is not being able to pay their bills, buy groceries, and do everything and then you’re going to say after two weeks well, you know, we’re going to give you your money that you lost on the payroll but we’re not going to pay the late payment you got on those bills and so forth. Mr. M. Williams: There you go talking about Pookie again now. Don’t do that. 21 Mr. Boxer: Well, if an employer suspends an individual pending the outcome of an investigation without pay, first of all they have an obligation to do that investigation as expeditiously as possible. If you have an investigation that stretches on for beyond two weeks we’re not doing our job in doing that investigation. So if you have a suspension for a brief period of time, that person either doesn’t miss a paycheck or quickly gets the paycheck so it shouldn’t be significant financial harm. Mr. M. Williams: I agree with that. Mr. Lockett: Okay, from one lawyer to another, Attorney Brown. Mr. Brown: (inaudible) the issue of legality, suspending them and then reinstating them, we would want to at least weigh the impact of morale not just of the employee that was suspended but of other employees because in the end if you put them on administrative leave, doesn’t that give the organization more incentive to complete that investigation so as not to waste money? Mr. Boxer: That’s true. But you could also say that if they don’t complete the investigation they have a big back pay. But this is a policy question; it’s not a legal issue. I’ve given my thoughts; ultimately you guys have to make your decision. But there are situations where an employee’s presence in the workforce poses a reasonable threat either to the organization or to other employees and I think in those situations it’s imperative to remove them from the workplace. Whether you pay them or not is a policy decision. If you pay them and you later conclude that they did bad stuff, you’re not going to get the money back. If you don’t pay them and they later are deemed to have not done anything wrong, you have to give them back pay and it does impose some I would argue minor burden on the people but that’s a policy call. Mr. Brown: I think it is a policy issue but we do want policy that encourages people to work here that makes people comfortable that their welfare is being considered. Agreed either way it gets the person out of the organization for a short period of time. If you’re saying that it’s a small amount of pay and won’t have that much impact on them, certainly that small amount of pay would not have nearly as much impact on an organization as large as we are. Certainly that one week or two week pay has ten times more impact on an individual than it would on an organization. So it would appear to me that the organization could afford to bear the burden and could speed up its investigation where an individual has nothing that they can do to solve the problem at that time. I just think those should be considered. Mr. Boxer: Those points have merit. Mr. M. Williams: Mr. Brown, I hear what you’re saying and I understand an organization may be strong enough to sustain what we need to do but I don’t think this is going to happen every day. This is something that may happen once a year if that often and if we’ve got employees once a year that we’ve got to do that to we really need to take a look at our employees. So I’m in agreement that I think the policy should be if we put them on leave for whatever period of time, two weeks or whatever, just leave and then reimburse them if they hadn’t done anything. They’ve got paid vacation. I mean that’s what it really amounts to. I want 22 to be fair to an employee but I want to be fair to this government as well. If you ain’t got no basis, if the employee says well Ben Hasan got suspended for two weeks but they paid him back and I don’t know what, they might get me, something is wrong, you ain’t doing your job because your job ought not to be (inaudible) where Ben was so my point is the government ought to be able to say we think you did something wrong so we’re going to put you on leave. And then if we find you didn’t do anything wrong, we’re going to reimburse you, going to pay you for the leave, take everything out of your (inaudible), that’s something we need to adopt. I don’t think the government ought to let people think (inaudible). Mr. Boxer: Okay, we’ll go on to policy four, conflict of interest. The general thrust here is employees should not engage in activities that conflict with the interest of Augusta, Georgia. You have areas of financial conflict of interest, acceptance or providing gifts and relationships that employees have with entities that want to seek to do business with Augusta, Georgia. And those are all covered by this proposed conflict of interest policy. This is a policy that we propose that not only would HR have a role in interpreting and administering but also Procurement because of the critical role that Procurement plays in areas that could give rise to conflicts of interest. Okay. Mr. Mayor: With regard to the conflict of interest policy, as I understand it there is an ethics ordinance that has been adopted. Is this tracking with that? Is this married to that? Just as a point of information because they are in fact related. Mr. Boxer: I didn’t (inaudible) an ethics proposed policy. I think there should be one. Mr. Mayor: There is one. Mr. Boxer: I think I saw it in the personnel policy manual. Maybe I missed it. Mr. Mayor: That’s correct. There is an ordinance. Mr. Boxer: Okay. I think the two should be developed in harmony. Mr. Mayor: That’s correct. Mr. Boxer: They relate to each other in a significant degree. I’m sorry, I didn’t look at that ordinance. Mr. Brazzell: We’ll get that for you. Mr. Boxer: They overlap but they’re not identical. Mr. M. Williams: Who determines whether or not there is a conflict? Mr. Boxer: I would suggest that initially we were going to put that in the procedure and I think that would be the department manager because that person would be most knowledgeable 23 about the duties of the individual in question. That department manager should feel free to consult with legal and/or HR as appropriate. Mr. M. Williams: If a department head don’t address it, and if it’s known that it’s there, someone’s got to say something in order to get it brought to the table so the department head, I guess anyone who knows about issues ought to be able to bring it to the Administrator, the governing body – Mr. Boxer: I would suggest as a first order and I didn’t see this in the manual, maybe you have it, I would suggest that we have a form in which employees are encouraged to disclose any outside activities that they have that they think might be a conflict of interest. And that would be the primary way that this stuff would come to Augusta’s attention and then a decision can be made as to whether or not or maybe something has to be modified either in their job duties or the outside activity. Surely we’re not going to preclude others from notifying Augusta that they think another employee has a potential conflict and we (inaudible) a variation on that same form for that purpose. I would want to create a culture where employees are encouraged perhaps on an annual basis to fill out the form and that would not only protect the organization but it would protect the employees so that if they’re doing activity A, B and C, they’ve got their form in and the organization says it’s okay, they ‘re free to do it and they’re safe. Mr. M. Williams: Something looks like it may be a conflict and it may not exactly be but I agree that something ought to be done so everybody would know if it is a conflict or they’re okay to do it. Mr. Boxer: We can put in the procedures examples of what are and are not conflicts. For example, gifts and I’m just throwing this out as an idea, I would not think that you would want any person in a procurement position to take anything of value from any entity that they do business with on behalf of the City. It means you could take anything that’s worthless, like a key chain, or stuff you don’t want, that you can take, but anything that you really want, you shouldn’t be allowed to take. And we could use that as an illustration of the kinds of things that are or are not conflicts in the procedures. Mr. M. Williams: And you’re talking about within this body not just personally because the attorney, it’s a different level, but when you accept gifts from folks and you’re in the position the department heads are in, it could become in my mind, now help me out. When you’re in a position in this government, when you accept gifts – Mr. Boxer: My recommendation would be that if a person is involved in a procurement process, they would not be allowed to accept anything of value from the entity that Augusta does business with. Like I said you could accept a key chain or a lead pencil – Mr. M. Williams: My Clerk just told me that the ethics part of this covers all of us. The Clerk: Everybody. Mr. Lockett: We have about 11 more items and we have one hour left. 24 Mr. Boxer: I’ll try to accelerate. Number five. Discharge. This is a policy specifically designed to address individuals whose performance or behavior is so unsatisfactory that they have to be involuntarily removed from the workplace. These would normally be preceded by at least one written reprimand and we talk about that in greater length in the corrective action or discipline policy. Now that doesn’t always mean you have to give a written reprimand. If one of your subordinates walks up to you and stabs you, you’ll be hauled off to the hospital, sewn up and then be brought back in the afternoon, you’re not required to go to that employee who stabbed you and said, “Well, I have to give you progressive discipline and warn you if you stab me again you may be discharged.” There are a couple of offenses that are grounds for immediate termination. Violence in the workplace, theft, significant violation of the harassment or discrimination policy. Those in my mind should be grounds for consideration of immediate termination. But I suspect if your organization is like many of the other organizations I’ve worked with the greatest number of issues arise from performance issues, absenteeism issues and those are more attuned to being addressed through a progressive discipline policy so there would be at least one written reprimand before the eventual termination. This does not apply to probationary employees. The issue also has to be addressed how you would handle the SES for poor work performance. Mr. M. Williams: There ought to be at least one written paper trail. Is that what you’re saying? Mr. Boxer: Yes. For your every day, run of the mill bad acts that employees engage in like coming in late, attendance is crummy, my performance is 50% of what it should be, there would be at least one written reprimand prior to the discharge. That would not apply to probationary employees. Anyone else have any questions on five? Okay, six. I think I would like to have this called corrective action rather than discipline and discharge. I don’t want to use the discharge twice. This policy embodies the concept for regular employees, not probationary employees, for progressive disciplinary process so that in the normal situation what you’d be looking for is corrective action to correct the behavior or performance that is found to be unsatisfactory. The idea of this is not to hammer people. The idea of this is not to fire people. The idea is you’ve invested a lot of money in hiring and training an individual. Hopefully you can turn the inappropriate behavior or performance around for a corrective action plan of increasingly severe disciplinary actions. We’re talking about verbal counseling, letter of warning, written reprimand, a performance improvement plan, corrective salary decrease, a suspension without pay or a demotion. These are the forms of corrective action. All do not have to be applied to every particular situation. Every employee is not entitled to run through every one of these steps. It depends upon the severity and frequency, length of service, employee’s prior record as to what the appropriate level of discipline should be in any particular situation. The way I’ve structured it verbal counseling and a letter of warning would not be formal discipline. They’d be informal discipline. If you go through that and it would get to be involved with some serious events, then you’d move into the formal disciplinary steps of written reprimand and suspensions, salary adjustment perhaps if your performance is not good at one level but you get satisfactory performance at a different level or lower level, those kinds of things. That’s the concept. 25 Mr. Sias: As you developed and went through this item six and this is an item that has been my concern for quite a while, in our PPM we have this disciplinary guidelines and procedure which you’re talking about but – Mr. Boxer: What page are you referring to so I can read along? Mr. Sias: In the manual itself? Mr. Boxer: Yes. Mr. Sias: On page 57, 58. Mr. Boxer: Oh, the chart. Mr. Sias: That’s correct. When you talk about this, what I see in this process where HR is part of the chain of command in this chart and that concerns me. It’s my thought that HR is supposed to be the honest broker whether it’s the employee, the department director or whoever. So when I see that HR is actually now making a disciplinary decision about an employee or upholding a disciplinary decision from my perspective that puts the HR Director out of their (inaudible). If a person works for manager A and then manager A is supervised by manager B and then manager C may be the Administrator or so forth. So how did HR get into that and I’m not really asking you that question how did it get in there. We put it in there somewhere. The idea is I don’t see that that is HR’s place to be in there. For me HR should be able to talk to that employee, talk to that manager and they’re saying HR is looking to see if there were irregularities or things improper in either way to advise either one of them. But in our manual, for example, if you get three days’ suspension, HR gets to make the decision of whether you do the suspension or not. I just don’t understand it. Mr. Boxer: You’ve raised a philosophical question as to what is the role of HR in any organization. This is not a legal question or answer. My view is HR is a resource to management. HR is supposed to make sure that the organization follows employment policies and employment laws and if a manager comes to HR for advice, HR should be in a position to give them advice as to what they think is or is not appropriate. If management comes to HR and says, “I’ve made a decision. I want to do x, y and z”, HR should be in a position to say, “Wait a minute. X, y and z are illegal or x, y and z violates policy 10. You can’t or shouldn’t do that.” But I don’t think ultimately HR should be making a disciplinary decision. I think ultimately that should be the province of the line management all the way up to the Administrator. Mr. Sias: And I agree wholeheartedly with you. But right now from what I understand in our book it’s the other way around. There’s a serious conflict of interest there where HR is making or upholding a disciplinary decision. Mr. Boxer: What I said earlier was whatever complaint procedure you ultimately adopt, I think HR can play a role in that procedure but I think the HR person who is involved in the complaint procedure should not be the HR person who was involved in the decision under dispute and HR is a big enough organization here, they have enough professionals that they can I 26 imagine say that we have HR manager A who was involved in a decision that an employee is challenging. Now that the employee is challenging it, we’re going to put HR manager B to be involved in that complaint resolution process. Mr. Sias: You’ve answered my question. HR should not be involved as a decision maker in that process. I don’t care whether it’s A through F in that Human Resources. That should be in the chain of command. We have personnel in the military and that’s exactly what they do. They advise us as to those folks and I’m just concerned about that and I’m definitely going to ask the Chair. I want to get that concern addressed somewhere in this process. Mr. Brazzell: We have a couple of department heads in the room who might want to comment on this as well. I think from the Administrator’s standpoint, Mr. Sias, you’re absolutely correct. If we don’t change anything else in this process, that needs to be changed so that the (inaudible) of HR gets clarified and they’re not sitting in the seat of judge and jury. Would you agree with that, Chief and Chief? Mr. Boxer: I think the practical reality is the department managers probably have a full plate. They are involved in engineering or technical stuff or policing or 911 stuff and they’re not HR experts. In fact, they’re probably in many cases HR idiots. So that’s why HR is there to help them and work with them through the process. But ultimately I think it should be the line management that makes those decisions. But that’s not a legal decision. There are other organizations that do it differently. Ms. Jackson: We want our HR Department to be in a position where they are prepared to give good advice and counsel to department directors that are seeking advice about how to handle certain disciplinary matters and I think that’s even more the reason that HR needs to be out of the decision making process. They are just there to advise. Mr. Sias: Absolutely. Mr. Lockett: And work on behalf of the Administrator. Mr. Sias: Well, absolutely we need to fix that. Mr. Lockett: Point well taken, Commissioner. Mr. Boxer: I guess I’d look for some direction from you people. Do you want the role of HR encapsulated in policy and if so, what role do you want HR to play? You don’t have to give us an answer now but it’s important obviously to you and the question is should that be in the policy? Mr. Brazzell: I think the role of consultant, the role of advisor. Mr. Boxer: Yeah. Well, is that the consensus of the group that you want it in that role? That’s what I think I’m hearing that you want HR to be a counselor not a decision maker. Should that be in the policy or the procedure? 27 Ms. Jackson: I think they should be in the policy (inaudible) general statement alluded to the fact that HR is available to provide advice and counsel to department directors as they make decisions related to various types of corrective action. Also HR is available to the employees for assistance. Mr. Boxer: Number seven. Employee records. I got a little tutorial on the Georgia Open Records Act this morning which was helpful. One thing you have to decide as a matter of policy is when employees have a right to get their personnel files. A progressive employer would do that voluntarily even if not obligated to do so. But one policy question is do you want to make the employee pay for that request or pay for the production of the file? Do you want to make them pay for it only after the first one? Do you want to make them pay for it if they do it more than once every three months? I imagine there might be some employees out there who abuse this process. It’s probably not everyone; it’s probably a small minority but you may want to encapsulate into the policy some deterrents to abuse of the employee record opportunity. You can think about that issue. Number eight. Equal employment opportunity policy. I think the main issue here for your consideration is what protected categories do you want to include in the policy. There are as you well know a number of policies that are protected by federal and state law. Age, race, sex, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, veterans’ status. But there are other categories that are not protected by federal or state law. Sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, medical condition. Do you want to add some or all of those or other conditions or categories into your EEO policy? On the one hand one can argue that’s a progressive way to go or Augusta, Georgia should not be discriminating against individuals based on non-(inaudible) related factors and should encompass that in your policy. On the other hand, to the extent that you do put in these protected categories in the policy that are not legally protected you’re creating rights among your workforce that they don’t legally have so you have to weigh those considerations. I can’t give you what’s, there’s no legal answer to that. My judgment is that you’d be better off incorporating into the policy the values that you want Augusta, Georgia to reflect and I assume you don’t want the organization to be making job related decisions based on factors that are not related to job success. Mr. Lockett: Your individual values as far as I’m concerned don’t carry much weight. Now LGBT is very important. We are trying to attract industry; we are concerned about economic development but we need to be on the front line when it comes down to making sure that everybody’s rights are protected. I’m not saying put something in there that’s against the law but if it’s legal, I feel it should be there to let them know that Augusta, Georgia Richmond st County has finally moved into the 21 century. Mr. Boxer: I will take that as a desire to include more protected category groups that aren’t necessarily required by law as a means of ensuring that Augusta, Georgia presents a progressive face to the rest of the world. Chief James: I’m not disagreeing with what he’s saying but could it be considered based on some of the occupational fields we have you mentioned the word medical, discriminating medical or whatever or handicapped wise there are some occupations that may be in the city that if you put them in there, they will be a thing that will have to make us do a reasonable consideration that there may be some jobs that we have that you have to have all of your limbs or 28 you have to have certain things so not disagreeing with including all those things in there, but just asking that those certain things be considered because I think it could put the city (inaudible) and make us liable to have to make exceptions to certain personnel for a medical reason or disability that traditionally I know like in the fire service we might not be able to make those allowance cheaply. It would be very costly if I had a firefighter with one arm, not that it couldn’t happen, but – Mr. Loeser: I’d like to add (inaudible) issue with Northrup with the drivers, bus drivers and the epileptics that there was (inaudible) the Department of Transportation forbids you from discriminating against epileptics as school bus drivers but if a school bus driver has an occurrence and crashes the bus you’re liable for that. So that’s exactly what you’re saying. Chief James: It’s just to say because our government has incorporated a physical standard where we send the firefighters to get a physical every year. If you are a certain level of diabetic, they prevent you from being on duty and so I was just saying those type of things are to be considered. Mr. Loeser: That would be more in the job specs as minimum qualifications. Mr. Boxer: Well, let’s say, what you’ve said and what Bill said are not inconsistent. You can say on the one hand we’re not going to discriminate as an organization based on all these different protected categories but you could also say with the exception of disability and religion, I’ll get to that in a second, that whatever your condition is or whatever category you fall into, we’re not lowering our job standards and whether you’re black, old, Jewish, Catholic, disabled, veteran, you still have to meet the standards and you don’t lower the standards simply because someone falls into a protected group. Now the two exceptions are religion and disability. You do as a matter of law have to reasonably accommodate a person’s religious beliefs and a person’s medical or disability condition. And it comes down to the disability or religion situation and an individual fact based assessment as to whether or not the particular disability can be accommodated. I would argue and I’m not familiar with those regulations that you cited, but if someone is an epileptic, I would not give them a job as a driver. I have some friends with epilepsy and they won’t drive because they know that they have that potential for blacking out so you’re going to have to make a fact based assessment on a medical condition and medical condition or disability, medical condition is a (inaudible) term (inaudible) cancer but disability in general is a protected category. We don’t have any choice as to whether or not to include that in the policy. We have to include it and we have to accommodate individuals who have medical conditions to a reasonable degree. I don’t know whether a fireman with one arm can reasonably be accommodated. I don’t know enough about the job and the requirements but that would be a fact based assessment but that was one we don’t have any choice about. Bill mentioned LGTB. That we do have a choice about because they’re not legally protected. So the question is do you want to put among other things LGTB protection in the policy when it’s not legally required? Mr. Hasan: Around that issue where is the country going? Has the country embraced anything? 29 Mr. Boxer: It depends which continent you go to. If you go to Asia the LGTB community is doing all that well there. If you go to Europe the LGTB is making a lot of progress in terms of getting statutory protection for that condition. Within the United States while there is not federal protection for the LGTB community, many municipalities and an increasing number of states LGTB protection is being afforded as well as sexual orientation, gender identity, all those kinds of variables. I can say the movement in the United States is toward protecting that group. Mr. Hasan: So sexual orientation would fall into what we’re talking about now? Mr. Boxer: Yes. Mr. Hasan: And also wouldn’t marriage from a national perspective (inaudible) being ushered in that direction? Mr. Boxer: You know you would think that but it’s not true. There has been virtually no movement on protection of marital status. There are a minority of states that protect marital status. It is not protected at the federal level and there hasn’t been much movement legally in that protection area. It seems to me and this is just me talking, I have no power, why would anyone discriminate against anyone because of their marital status? But some organizations do but there has not been a movement there. Mr. Lockett: There have been some major companies trying to move a certain community because of their opposition to LGBT and if we can use that as a calling card to let them know, hey, Augusta, we welcome all. Come home. Mr. Boxer: Well, I put it in the proposed policy. So you guys have to tell me whether you want it in or out. Mr. M. Williams: I think we have to be very careful. (inaudible) That’s why I thought we need to at least talk about this and get an understanding. Mr. Lockett: I met with a group a couple of weeks ago and with an attorney and they indicated that, it has it on the books (inaudible) enforceable. We can just say (inaudible) but if we have somebody that’s employed by us or sought employment with us and they wouldn’t have a leg to stand on unless we made it part of our policy. Mr. Boxer: That’s correct. Mr. Hasan: Several months ago we received a letter from someone from the LGBT leadership and their concern was I think in your conversation with (inaudible) that we had something in place for some protection and you were supposed to have gotten back with us. Do you remember that conversation? Do you remember that letter? Mr. MacKenzie: Yeah, I remember that. He was here earlier. I think he had to step out. He was a local attorney and we didn’t get here in time for him to speak to that issue. We don’t 30 currently have in our policies and procedures any kind of protection. I think there was some language in our application process that may have indicated some protection there. That’s what we’re looking at and that’s what we’re tasking the consultant to do is give some direction if you want to go that way. It’s a policy decision. There are some federal cases that are out there pending where there is also discrimination claims on a religious basis relating to this issue as well so it’s something that is a policy issue but there is a lot of litigation surrounding this issue. Mr. Boxer: Any other questions? I think we can skip nine. I don’t think we need to review fair chance. Ten is hiring. The main (inaudible) of this policy is to set forth the areas where you are not required to engage in your normal recruitment process. So for example if you’re demoting a person, you’re not going to go out and recruit to fill that position that he or she may be demoted into. If you’re recalling someone from layoff into the position they previously held, you’re not to go off and recruit for that position. If you’re going to slam dunk someone into a position in lieu of a layoff, you’re not going to recruit for that position. Then there would be catch all language that the Administrator would have the ability to waive the recruitment process in special circumstances as he or she sees fit. On the career ladder the idea is that there are job families that people would move up and through as they acquire additional skills and experience. You wouldn’t have a recruitment for that. If you’re a Mechanic I and you get more skills and experience you’d move up to Mechanic II even though there may not be a vacancy. That would reflect the person’s increased skills and experience. I suspect it may also afford an ability to offer pay raises when that might not otherwise be available. The career ladder concept also gives hiring managers the ability to post a job at multiple levels and depending upon the skills and experience of the applicants that they are presented with, they may say we’re going to hire you as a Mechanic II or Mechanic III or Mechanic IV. So you can post the job with a range of job classifications and hire accordingly. Mr. M. Williams: Is there any way we can compare what this new policy is or the changes to the old one so I can look at those? Mr. Boxer: Would it be helpful if we, in presenting this to you, give you a little chart for each policy saying these are the changes, these are the similarities – Mr. M. Williams: That’s what I’m asking. Mr. Hasan: But don’t strike them out, just leave them blank so we could see them. Mr. Boxer: Would it be better if I present the proposed policy with an addendum that says in policy 10 we’ve made the following changes, deletions and additions? Would that be helpful? Mr. Lockett: That would be fine. Mr. Boxer: Moving on to number 11, holidays. Shouldn’t be too controversial. I took out of the policy the listing of specific holidays. I think the organization should have the flexibility to determine on an ongoing basis and an annual basis, this is going to be a (inaudible) year. We’ve gotten a $10-million-dollar bonus from the federal government, we’re going to give 31 everyone one extra holiday or it’s going to be a lean year and we’re going to have to only eight holidays next year – Commissioners respond no. Mr. Boxer: My concept is that the policy would simply say Augusta, Georgia is going to give holidays to employees and at the beginning, at the end of the year preceding the next year we’ll tell you how many holidays and when the holidays are scheduled so I’m making this up. In November HR would issue a pronouncement saying that holiday schedule for 2017. 11 holidays, this is when they are. And the next year the Mayor may say I just got a billion-dollar inheritance and I want to spend some of it on the workforce in Augusta, Georgia and you go up to 12 holidays for 2018. The policy would afford you that flexibility. That’s all I’m trying to do. Mr. Lockett: With this government within the next six years we’ll be down to two paid holidays a year. No. That is a bad thing to do. And then you’ve got to decide the last holiday we got I fought for about three years to get Veterans Day and so we decide the next year, hey, we’ve got kind of a lean year. We need to get rid of one. Why don’t we get rid of Veterans Day? A lots of people are self-employment because of vacation time, holiday time. That’s a decision. That’s why a lot of people become educators because they usually get three months off in the summer but, no, I think that’s the worst thing that you’ve said, Mr. Boxer. Mr. Boxer: My criticism is not how many holidays you give. It’s not even a criticism. It’s just a suggestion that you afford yourself as an organization greater flexibility. It may be that you don’t want to change the number of holidays but maybe you want to move them around. Maybe July 4 falls on a Thursday and you want to give July 5 in lieu of Veterans Day because it gives the employees a four-day weekend. That’s all I’m suggesting. Mr. Lockett: That’s why I don’t like it. You just said Veteran’s Day. Mr. Boxer: All right, forget it. We’ll go to a fixed holiday schedule. Mr. Brazzell: Yes. Mr. Boxer: I stand corrected. I’ve been educated. Mr. M. Williams: He’s going to be gone. Mr. Lockett: If all of ya’ll are concerned about the employees, (inaudible). Mr. Hasan: We’ll make sure we keep Veterans Day, Commissioner. Mr. Boxer: Okay, number 12. My mind has been altered on the holidays. Leaves of absence. This incorporates all of the statutory leaves of absence that are required. Plus, it incorporates annual leave which I assume that’s the term that is used here for vacation the way I read it. 32 The Clerk: We call it vacation. Mr. Brazzell: Although we talked about maybe combining vacation and sick leave but I don’t think we’ve gotten there yet. Mr. Boxer: Well, that’s a good point because certainly the trend in employment is to combine the sick leave and vacation/annual leave, the idea being let the employees manage their own paid time off. You don’t want to encourage situations where people feign illness, not that any of the employees of Augusta would do this, but if don’t want to encourage a situation where people feign illness to use up their sick leave. You know if I’m healthy and the other guy is sick I feel abused because I don’t get to take all the time off he is. Mr. Loeser: It’s a (inaudible) is when people call you in December that HR Department and say how many sick days do I have left. You know what’s going on and the point is the honest people who are really hard working and honest and don’t like to abuse it are in this dichotomy. They’ve got to say well, I’d like to be home with my family and use those sick days but I don’t want to be dishonest so this you know this PTO has developed so that everybody gets the days. It’s not the people who lied and abused who get a reward of getting “x” number of days. Mr. Boxer: Is that a consensus that you want to look into or pursue, the idea of a combined paid time off? Mr. M. Williams: (inaudible) Mr. Lockett: And you know another thing businesses and others recommend short and frequent vacation because oftentimes you are not sick physically but mentally. You need to get a few days off at some point and some major employers are doing theirs, suggesting, recommending, in many cases dictating to their employees you will take time off on a regular basis and studies show that when you do that, your employees are much more productive. Mr. Boxer: Well, that’s facilitated by combining it into a PTO benefit rather than two separate accounts. It is probably easier to administer, that’s one less account for the HR people to worry about. Mr. Smitherman: (inaudible) and how all that fits together because this has been looked into in the past and was shot down the last time it was brought up. One of the issues that we would need to address and think about is that vacation time is an accrued benefit that we have to pay out. Sick leave is not, that you don’t pay out so once you combine them you need to think about upon an employee’s separation from employment what amount of that is considered an accrued benefit and therefore has to be paid out and what part does not have to be paid out. That needs to be set forth very clearly. You need to think about how that fits into our retirement plans because the retirement plan allows the employee to roll sick time into accrued credited service but does not allow to accrued vacation so those are just all the things, there are several things to take into consideration that when you contemplate putting annual leave and sick leave 33 together it’s not just, it doesn’t affect just, the leave policy affects several things within our organization. Mr. Boxer: Is that a Georgia legal requirement that vacation time be accrued and paid out on termination? Ms. Smitherman: The case law in Georgia generally is that vacation leave is an accrued benefit and once accrued, it belongs to the employee unless (inaudible). Mr. Sias: I would think to our attorney’s point I think for me it just, a point here and a comment that that was a quick reference answer to that and I want her to hear my reference. Ms. Smitherman: I apologize. Mr. Sias: You’re simply capturing things. If you have 18 days leave sick and you can get 30 days’ vacation giving you 38 then the amount you’re going to be able to do could be capped at 30 as far as rolling over, going on forth like that. Do you see what I’m saying? There are certain things we’ve done in the military related to that. You cap certain things. So that answers for me in a quick reference that sets up a starting point. You have a cap on certain things. Ms. Smitherman: I agree. Legally we can set forth those parameters. I’m just saying we need to make sure we can set them and do set them forth otherwise the default is going to be that it is an accrued benefit and suddenly it’s all payable or it’s all, we need to make sure that we address it up front. Mr. Boxer: Perhaps you want to look at usage of sick leave before you make a change. If every employee is using, if 99% of the employees are using 100% of their sick leave, they’re probably using it as vacation or annual leave. On the other hand, if you see significant variations in the utilization of sick leave then maybe people aren’t taking all their sick leave and maybe you don’t want to roll it over to PTO. Mr. Loeser: My argument would be you would because that’s telling me that some people are taking advantage and other people aren’t and you’re rewarding the people who are crooks for taking advantage of it. Mr. Lockett: We don’t have any crooks – Ms. Elam: Augusta, Georgia does support employees. We (inaudible) benefits open enrollment. Sick leave. There is a sick leave policy currently in our P3M that allows those individuals if they contribute a certain amount they can get up to 480 hours. This is outside of their approved sick leave. Are we eliminating that because I don’t see that here in this policy? Mr. Boxer: That is a benefit issue and I haven’t yet addressed benefit issues. That’s basically, if I read the policy right and understand what you’re saying, people can basically purchase time off. 34 Ms. Elam: No. They only put in 15 hours. There is a sick leave policy that (inaudible) individuals if they elect it. I’m mentioning this because you’re talking about sick leave so when you talk about that, is that something ya’ll are going to eliminate that benefit that’s tied to sick leave if you do PTO? If you do PTO, would that be tied into that PTO if I elect that during open enrollment or if I’m grandfathered in today and I get those (inaudible). That’s all I’m asking. Mr. Boxer: I don’t think you would get, I really thought about this at great length because I can address the issue of combining these two, but it seems to me this supplemental sick leave is something that is part of the benefit package that you – Ms. Elam: It’s not part of the benefits package. It’s part of a policy that’s been put in place. Mr. Boxer: That you’re paying for. Ms. Elam: Right, but it’s part of the policy and I’m asking because I don’t see it addressed here. Mr. Boxer: I think the two are independent. In theory it seems to me if you wanted to combine the sick leave with the annual leave to a PTO you could maintain or eliminate the program that you’re talking about. Ms. Elam: Okay. I just wanted to mention that for individuals (inaudible) because it’s not addressed in here and that’s something that’s been utilized prior to me even coming to Augusta. Mr. Boxer: Okay, turning to 13. 13 is just a performance evaluation policy. I think it’s important to enshrine in policy the concept that people will be periodically evaluated so they know where they stand. I suggest that it be done on no less than an annual basis. It could be done more frequently but I think that employees have a policy mandated right to have at least, no less than an annual performance evaluation. Mr. Lockett: Do you have a recommendation when these evaluations should be effective, any time of the year or do you do it on 1 January or 1 July? Mr. Boxer: I would seek input from the supervisors on this because they have to do it. One method is you do it on an annual basis that all are due on a certain date of the year. That’s a real burden on a supervisor during a short period of time to crank them out. Another alternative would be to do it on the employee’s anniversary date. That lessens the intense burden on supervisors but then they’re doing them all year round. I don’t know which is better as I’ve never been a major supervisor. I’ve never had to do a lot of those evaluations. My view is if I were a supervisor, I’d rather do it in one big fell swoop because I can compare other people against each other. A critical element of a performance evaluation is it shouldn’t be done in isolation. It should be done in part in comparison to the coworkers. You don’t want to have a performance evaluation where everybody is rated above average. That only happens in (inaudible) so I think it would be better to do them all at one time. 35 Mr. M. Williams: (inaudible). Mr. Boxer: But I didn’t put that in the policy. All I said in the policy is everyone should get an, no less than an annual evaluation. 14 also shouldn’t be terribly controversial. It’s issue classification policy and it just talks about the criteria that Augusta should be using to classify positions into job classification or a job family. You basically want to pay people who have similar skills and have similar responsibilities a similar pay rate. Probationary policy, 15. This is largely adopted from what you, what is currently in the PPPM. It provides for a one-year probationary policy. During probationary policy the employees would not have the right to utilize the grievance procedure. They would be terminable at will. It doesn’t remove their ability to challenge an employment decision in court so the fact that a probationary person is probationary doesn’t mean you completely abuse them. And one could argue from that that they should have the right to file a grievance because you can’t deprive them of their right to go to court, but the general trend of employment is to not allow probationary employees to file complaints or grievances. Mr. Brown: As a commission isn’t one of our concerns about probation the length of probation? It is one year and maybe the expert consultant may know better, I don’t know, but one year seems, I do not think it would take one year to evaluate people at a certain level. The jobs that are being evaluated for one year are the least complicated jobs of the jobs we have and we’re taking longer to determine for a year that (inaudible) managerial abuse because you already know before a year whether that person fits in or not. Mr. Lockett: I agree with you wholeheartedly because you get somebody and they get the job, they understand they’re on probation for one year but you get the job and you feel you’re doing a good job so you go out and you buy an automobile and you rent yourself a nice apartment and so forth and then you (inaudible) eleven months and (inaudible) let you go and you’ve got no recourse. Mr. Boxer: You’ve got recourse in going to court – Mr. Lockett: You’re (inaudible) a car and an apartment. You’re out of money to go to court. (inaudible) Mr. Boxer: One could make the argument and I think about the argument that you shouldn’t have a probationary period. You are, as an organization already an employer at will so from a legal perspective the distinction to say that we can terminate a regular employee at will and we can terminate a probationary employee at Augusta’s discretion, I don’t think there’s a legal distinction there and one can even make the argument that if you have a probationary period that once you’ve successfully completed it, you’ve somehow risen into a greater level of protection than you’ve had before. So I would argue, if I were starting a company, I wouldn’t have a probationary period. I would have employment at will. I would say you’re subject to termination at the will of the employer which is only half true because you could do it for no reason but you can’t do it for an illegal reason. But I don’t what the probationary period really adds. 36 Mr. Lockett: We’ve got attorneys here. Ms. Smitherman. Ms. Smitherman: The difference is in a business, in a private employer, you can be an employee at will. You don’t have a property interest in your job. As a public employee you have a property interest in your job which requires certain due processes that be followed. By having a probationary period and saying you have no property interest in your position during that probationary period what we’re allowed to do away with is that due process requirement, the appeals rights, that kind of thing. That’s the distinction and why it’s important to us as a public employer, the probationary period. Mr. Boxer: She’s right. I’ve overlooked the section. We never had to deal with due process. She’s 100% right, but I think one year is excessive. Mr. Lockett: That’s what I was going to ask you. Do we need one year? Ms. Smitherman: That is a policy question. How long you want it to be is a policy question. Mr. Lockett: How long do you think would be necessary for due process? Ms. Smitherman: I think that is something I would defer to the department director because they’re the ones who see how long it takes to adequately see employee performance, evaluate employee performance. Mr. Brazzell: Six months. Mr. Lockett: The Deputy Administrator says six months. Mr. M. Williams: And we’re talking about a probationary period. I hadn’t seen a probationary period since I’ve been here. We say that, when folks get hired, they’re hired. Maybe somebody in HR can tell me when somebody has been let go when they didn’t perform. Ms. Elam: That has occurred. Mr. M. Williams: I’m sure it has but it has been very rare, especially at the department head level. When we hire somebody there should be a probationary period so they’ll know what we expect of them. Six months or a year there ought to be something put in place that we go by and do but for so long we say we’re a right to work state and we can let you go. But people get in here and don’t do their job and make a whole lot more money than I make. Chief James: For some of the departments it takes you more than six months to train them and/or get their certifications so we allow people up to a year to get those certifications for employment and if they don’t get it prior to their year that they don’t meet that standard then we can release them at that time. If we reduce that probationary period to six months, then we 37 would have to go through the process and it takes longer for some of them to get their certifications for certain jobs. Mr. Lockett: This won’t necessarily be across the board because just like the 37.5 hours some people work different things so it wouldn’t be across the board. Mr. Mayor: I’m going to go back to Boxer’s point though and I think you were going there but you backed away from it, the question becomes what is the intent of the probationary policy? That question then really determines whether or not you need one. I think that’s the real question. What is the intent of a probationary policy? We’ve already established that yes, Georgia is an at will state. Yes, you can summarily dispose of an employee for a non-showing or cause so do you need a probationary policy because in the Chief’s case, if they don’t get certifications, they’re going to be released anyway. That has nothing to do with a (inaudible). The notion of probation says you’re going to be measured on these things and I don’t know of a job position or description in this government where there are a series of, where there is a rubric that you hand the employee and say at 30 days you have to do this, at 60 days you have to do this and at 90 days you have to do this. I’m not aware of that rubric and so to that end, what is the basis for having a “probationary policy”. Mr. Brown: It’s like Jody says. We have kind of altered that. The at will aspect of Georgia employment practice by giving equal (inaudible) steps to a person on probation during that period of time. You do not have a right to engage in those rigorous steps. We don’t have to give you progressive discipline when you’re on probation. The probation period, whatever length it is, is of course a Commission decision. Mr. Mayor: I would find that to be very litigious in that you are saying okay during this period I don’t have the ability to appeal, I don’t have rights of grievance. Mr. Brown: You don’t have rights of grievance in terms of work performance not in terms of things that are state or federal law. You can’t discriminate against anyone whether they’re on probation or not. You can’t legally discriminate against someone. But in terms of work performance, if I have a problem with your work, if you’re on probation they need to tell you what it is, write it up, give you a performance plan and give a time to do it because you’re somewhat vested in this organization. We have accepted you. And if you hire somebody and they start messing up, coming in late the first week they’re late five times out of ten, you don’t have to go through writing them up and all that. Mr. Hasan: When I hear the probationary period what I’m hearing you all are saying if I have a year probation and I’m screwing up you can’t release me until the end of the year, is that what you’re saying? Several people answer no. Mr. Lockett: I made the comment about if you’re on twelve months’ probation and after 11 months, after three months or after a week they can tell you they don’t want you no more. But if you’ve got 12 months’ probation and you’ve been working for nine months and your 38 supervisor hadn’t called you in and said you haven’t done anything wrong and you think you’re doing good and you go out and buy a car, get that apartment and then you to 11 months and then the supervisor says they don’t want you no more, so no. When you get off probation they can still let you go but under different circumstances. We don’t want that hanging over your head for a whole year. Mr. Hasan: I’m inclined to believe from three to six months I am excited about the job and I’ll be all right for six months. Mr. Boxer: One thing I did take out of the current policy is the concept if people move to another job, they go back on to probation and that’s a pretty uncommon practice. Again that’s not a legal issue. It’s a policy issue. I think that’s pretty contrary to best employment practices. Substance abuse. Pretty much the standard language here about Augusta, Georgia. (inaudible) as a federal contractor (inaudible) drug free workplace and a drug free workforce. (inaudible) free from the use of or possession or presence or distribution or manufacture or sale of unlawful substances. It also provides that employees who basically come to work unable to perform their work duties due to the effects of any substance be it legal or illegal are subject to discipline and provides the employer with the right to direct employees into a rehab program if they have objective evidence of working under the influence. Now the details of all this would be set forth in the procedures, the testing regime, we’re going to want to have discussion in the procedures about what is a reasonable basis for a manager to conclude that there is an employee problem or the employee is under the influence. That should be in the procedures. Mr. M. Williams: In this government now there is an employee who had never been tested any kind of way and there are some that have been tested ten and twelve times. So I want to see that everybody at some point or another be tested. There are some employees that have been “warned”, I can’t testify to that, but (inaudible) drivers of vehicles. But my thing is that we have a policy in place that is uniform and is going to work for everybody and it shouldn’t be Tyrone’s brother that always gets tested. Everybody should be tested. Mr. Boxer: The procedures will have criteria for when testing becomes, is involved. Fairly common reasons or standard reasons are if you get involved in an accident, if you are observed acting in a manner that one would reasonably believe you are under the influence, if you’re sleeping at work and have your head in a bowl of spaghetti. There are certain jobs, the most prominent of which come to mind are tractor/trailer drivers that federal law requires periodic random testing. It’s generally against better employment practices in my experience to do random testing across the board. So you’re not going to have even handed testing among every employee. You should have even handed testing among similarly situated employees so your drivers are going to be tested more than your gardener. The gardeners who have accidents are going to be tested at the same rate because whenever you have an accident you’re going to be tested, be it gardener or driver or any other. Mr. M. Williams: We’re talking about a policy here and I think the policy needs to be put in place with drugs. If you’re hooked on drugs, you’re hooked and you need to get some help if you’ve got a problem. Some people will never have that opportunity until makes them understand that. We need to have something in place where this governing body will have a 39 random, not every day, but a random testing. When you have a situation like this government is running now, there is some departments where the department head has never been tested but his employees have been tested 12 times. Mr. Boxer: Correct me if I’m wrong, Jody, but I don’t think random testing is prohibited in Georgia. Ms. Smitherman: It is not prohibited. For expense reasons we limit it to safety sensitive positions at this time but that is a policy question. Mr. Boxer: As a matter of policy if you wanted random testing, all classes of employees, there’s no legal prohibition against it. But it’s not commonly done. Mr. Lockett: Do you know what it costs for each time you test? There go the holidays right there. Ms. Smitherman: That would have to be the policy question. Right now you randomly test, right now we use a third party vendor to do our random testing. If everybody was in a safety sensitive position is in a pool with this third party vendor, they are the ones that pull these numbers. These numbers are then matched to whatever employee that employee is pulled. Right now it is under two safety sensitive positions. The decision the Commission would have to make is do we increase, if we want to keep the same percentage of employees being tested, we’d have to increase the cost because it’s going to cost, we’re going to be testing a larger number or do we in order to keep the cost the same, test a much smaller population because we now have a bigger pool to pull from. Mr. Hasan: Even if you deal with the safety sensitive and you try to stay conscious of the money that you’re currently spending, I would suspect if you have 40 persons out of the 150 safety sensitive, I would suspect as you randomly go through those 30 or 40 persons you pull a different pool of persons so eventually everybody would be tested. If you’re not doing that, I think you’re doing a disservice. Mr. M. Williams: If I can respond. Ain’t no sense in testing if we worry about what the cost is going to be. I mean we test for a reason. If we talk about saving money, there are other areas we can save money in. If you’re going to test people for a reason, then test them. Not because they had an accident. But if you’re testing everybody, if I ain’t got but $100 to spend so I’m only going to test two people and that’s all we’re going to do then we might as well not be concerned about the man that’s out of jail that wanted a job or the man on the job that’s doing drugs that’s working every day and needs some help but he don’t realize he needs help. So when you’re running a government agency like this one, we ought to be looking at saving money some other way. Mr. Lockett: My recommendation come January of next year is all the commissioners need to be tested. 40 Mr. Boxer: The rationale behind safety sensitive testing is that the people who occupy those positions are in a position to cause significant harm to themselves, other employees or Augusta. Your typical office worker employee sitting in a cubicle, if they’re stoned out of their mind, they’re not doing a good job but they’re not going to cause significant harm so it’s a tradeoff here saying there are certain jobs we want to spend the resources to random test because of the consequences that could occur. Mr. Mayor: There are two things. One, I see the idea around illegal use and then legal use or abuse of it so Georgia, we’re not California, we’re not Colorado, but most recently there’s been the adoption of medical marijuana for a number of defined purposes and as such, I am the guy sitting in the cubicle, I’ve been doing a good job but today I just happened to have been stoned out because I was in severe pain and I’ve applied more medicine than I normally would have. I don’t see us addressing this necessarily in this document but it is something that needs to be given consideration to and then two, going back to what Commissioner Hasan was asking in this conversation are we potentially in those defined classes, are we being somewhat discriminatory in nature with regards to how we’re talking about applying it? Those are the two things I’ll put out there. Mr. Boxer: Even in California and Colorado where they have medical marijuana and of course Colorado where they have recreational marijuana, the law is such that you’re still not permitted to be under the influence of any substance be it lawful or unlawful and employers do have the right if they have a policy like this to discipline or discharge employees who come to work under the influence. That’s been ratified by both the California and Colorado Supreme Courts. So I would argue even if you’re lawfully using a prescription medicine you don’t have the right to come to work under the influence and I think the procedures we’re going to outline would call for employees among other things to voluntarily notify Augusta if they are taking prescription medication. And two, if an employee feels they do have a substance abuse problem, that there is an avenue that they’d go to, something like an employee assistance program that they can go into that voluntarily and they wouldn’t be disciplined under this and they’d be given time off, assistance, etc. to solve the problem rather than fire them. Mr. M. Williams: We’ve got employees who know and understand what some employees are doing and they really feel like they’re being taken advantage of because you’ve come to work (inaudible) and you’ve never been tested but they’re been tested four or five times and there’s a problem with that person doing it and especially and (inaudible) where the employee is working with somebody who is saying all kinds of stuff but there’s an issue we still need to address and we need to go on and address it because of cost of the test. Mr. Lockett: Mr. Loeser, don’t we have a policy in place if one employee suspects another employee of using illegal drugs or doing anything where it could be reported? Mr. Loeser: I’d have to check into that. Ms. Smitherman: We do have reasonable suspicion in the Personnel Policies and Procedures Manual. That employee would need to go to their supervisor and say these are the 41 immediate things I’ve seen and have a reasonable suspicion. The supervisor would then generally affirm those and they can go to Risk Management and begin a testing process. Ms. Jackson: In accordance with the schedule that Mr. Loeser laid out in his opening presentation and I think we have copies for the committee. On page 5 of that where it talks about Phase I the policy, yes, page 5, this is still the policy phase obviously after today’s meeting we would give our department directors an opportunity to review the policies in July and get input back to our HR Department and the consulting team. Then we would have the next meeting of our sub-committee on August 11 which would present our opportunity to give you our final recommendations on all of these items. We would also give after that the Law Department the opportunity to complete the review with the goal of being ready to present to the full Commission on August (inaudible). Mr. Lockett: Mr. Boxer. Mr. Boxer: I am your servant, yes. Ms. Jackson: I guess that is a question and thank you for bringing it up. It was envisioned that the sub-committee presents to the Administrative Services Committee prior to presentation to the full Commission? The Clerk: That was in the letter, the appointment letter. Mr. M. Williams: That was the way the process was set out. It was supposed to come back to Administrative Services. Ms. Jackson: Okay. We will amend that schedule that it go to the committee, whatever that committee meeting date is in August. Mr. Lockett: Yeah, you have an opportunity to amend that and copy us on whatever you come up with. Ladies and gentlemen, it has been a pleasure. I hope we got something out of this. Mr. Boxer, thank you and we appreciate you. ADJOURNMENT: There being no further business, the meeting was adjourned. Lena J. Bonner Clerk of Commission 42 43