The head of Fairfax County’s police union says the county shortchanged about 140 officers on pay they earned helping control crowds during President Barack Obama’s inauguration.
Marshall Thielen, president of the Fairfax Coalition of Police, filed and lost a grievance with the county’s Civil Service Commission seeking to recoup holiday pay that matched the grueling 18-hour shifts put in by the officers Jan. 20.
“It was not a desirable assignment,” he said. “In fact, it was a fairly dangerous assignment, and they’re not even compensating us for the extra holiday hours that we worked.”
The officers were compensated with regular and overtime pay for assisting the District with the inauguration. And they were given some holiday pay, but only for a typical eight- or 11.5-hour workday.
That’s the intent of Fairfax County’s holiday pay policy, said Human Resources Director Susan Woodruff, who added that granting Thielen’s request would have cost the police department about $95,000.
“It really isn’t intended in most situations to address overtime issues,” she said.
The Civil Service Commission, in a ruling late last month, sided with the county, ruling county personnel regulations “plainly require the payment of holiday pay without regard to overtime.”
Thielen argues that changes in personnel policies in 2006 required “hour-for-hour” holiday pay, but that a failure to fully amend the regulations created ambiguity.
The request was perhaps poorly timed, with Fairfax County staring at a $315 million budget shortfall for the fiscal year that begins July 2010, a figure that assumes no pay increases for county employees.
Fairfax County was among a number of local jurisdictions that offered law enforcement muscle to help herd the estimated 1 million people who attended the historic event.
