Dougherty Commission approves $73 million budget with new holiday for workers
By Alan Mauldin
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ALBANY — The addition of Juneteenth as a paid holiday for Dougherty County employees, included in the county’s 2020-2021 budget, will replace a floating holiday that was eliminated some two decades ago.
While the $73.7 million budget approved by the Dougherty County Commission on Monday does not include a pay increase for workers, it does include funding for a pay study that will be conducted in coming months.
“We have nine holidays,” County Administrator Michael McCoy told commissioners. “We used to have 10 until about 2010. With the addition of Juneteenth, we will go back to 10.”
Commissioner Victor Edwards suggested adding Juneteenth, the celebration of the emancipation of slaves in the United States, McCoy said. It was declared a federal holiday earlier this month.
Also of note for employees, the commission’s budget team will meet later this week, and employee compensation is a potential topic for that session.
“We’re going to have a Finance Committee meeting on Wednesday (to discuss) financial concerns related to the budget, so stay tuned,” McCoy said during a telephone interview after Monday’s meeting.
The pay study also will outline recommendations for employee compensation and is expected to be finished in the fall.
One of the biggest issues in putting together the spending plan for the fiscal year that begins Thursday was dealing with a steep hike in health insurance costs that totaled some $3 million. That included $2.3 million in direct health plan costs and the balance for the risk management insurance plan for the county’s self-insurance system.
The increased costs are related to several high-cost claims over the current year.
“We had one claim that was about $1.4 million,” McCoy said.
The commission did not increase taxes to handle the additional costs, but earmarked up to $6.6 million in the county’s fund balance of $14.4 million to balance the budget.
McCoy does not anticipate that the full $6.6 million will be spent.
The budget included an increase for the Dougherty County Coroner’s Office from the $185,000 originally recommended by the Finance Committee. During the Monday meeting the commission adopted committee recommendations to deny a $15,000 request from Coroner Michael Fowler for salary increases and also denied $75 payments for each visit by a coroner’s office to the morgue for releasing a body.
After the meeting, Fowler told The Herald he was satisfied with the overall budget consideration.
“That helps,” he said of the $198,620 budgeted for his office. “That puts me back in the neighborhood of where we need to be.”
Without that increase, it would have been a struggle because health insurance costs for the office’s one full-time employee are increasing from $7,000 to $20,000 for the next fiscal year, the coroner said. The $15,000 in salary requested was for adding a full-time deputy coroner position.
Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital, which currently houses the county’s morgue, is working with Fowler’s office to eliminate the need for the coroner or a deputy coroner to be on hand to release a body to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation crime laboratory or other entity, the coroner said.
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