Montgomery County pays employees an extra $2,000 to $4,000 a year if they know a second language — even if they never use it on the job, according to county records.
County Executive Ike Leggett’s proposed budget includes nearly $1 million to continue a long-standing program that pays county employees who speak a second language an extra $1 to $2 an hour for every hour worked. The extra money is part of several labor contracts and is paid regardless of whether the employee actually uses the language on the job, according to county council staff.
Employees who earn the extra money are spread throughout various department and positions in the county.
The Department of Correction and Rehabilitation pays extra to nurses, guards, therapists and records technicians who speak a number of lesser-known languages — including Akan, Bengali, Esu, Ewe, Ibo, Telugu, Urdu and Yoruba.
The county also pays extra money to police and firefighters who speak Portuguese, secretaries who speaks Hindi and a crossing guard who speak Greek.
The county’s school employees are not included in the program, but are paid an extra $9 per hour for each hour they speak a foreign language on the job, according to county staff.
County employees who receive the extra $1 to $2 an hour on their paychecks must be fluent in English and pass a foreign language proficiency test.
More than two-thirds of the 643 employees who receive the additional pay speak Spanish.
Proponents of the program said the extra pay was a useful recruitment tool to help staff a diverse county government that’s more responsive to county residents’ needs. They pointed out that there are 134 languages spoken by students at the county’s public schools.
“Given the diversity of people who live here, we wanted our staff to resemble a photograph of the community,” said Department of Correction and Rehabilitation Director Arthur Wallenstein. “That includes cultural diversity and linguistic diversity.”
Wallenstein said it was difficult to predict when the need for a foreign language speaker will arise, and it’s prudent to have a diverse staff on the payroll. He pointed out that employees who earn extra for speaking a foreign language are part of a county database and may be called by other departments for language help.
The county also has contracts with private interpreting services that offer translation help over the phone. A county spokesman said the total amount the county spent on translation services was not available, but the Department of Health and Human Services, which has about 250 foreign language speakers on its payroll, has spent $42,000 on outside translation services in the last 10 months.
With the county facing a budget shortfall of $520 million, county council staff recommended cutting the extra language pay for a year.
A committee unanimously rejected that proposal last week, but proposed that the Office of Legislative Oversight review the program for ways to make it more cost-effective.
