As the “sickout” staged by employees in the City of Selma Public Works Department over wages, personnel and equipment approaches the one-month mark, council members are wondering how the workers have been able to accrue the hours necessary to cover their time away from the job, as well as how the department was able to be crippled by the absence of its entire workforce.

During a Selma City Council meeting earlier this week, Selma City Councilwoman Jannie Thomas presented council members with a breakdown of how many hours of comp time have been collected by employees in the department, raising alarms across the board.

According to the accrual balance report for the Public Works Department, the 12 employees that make up the department have accrued 4,739 hours of sick time and 2,062 hours of sick time as of Oct. 21.

One employee has more than 1,200 hours of sick time and another has more than 800, while three employees have more than 300 hours of vacation time.

“This presents a problem for me on multiple levels,” said Selma City Councilwoman Miah Jackson, who harped on the issue during the council work session Monday. “There were several instances I saw where [accrued time] seemed to be misapplied.”

A closer look at the week-to-week breakdown of how the time was allocated in the city’s bi-weekly payroll timesheet shows that multiple employees were paid for eight hours of work on Mondays and Tuesdays and given vacation time the rest of the week.

However, other employees, between Sept. 25 and Oct. 1, were marked as having worked full weeks, despite the fact that work the department is supposed to do has been left undone for weeks – for her part, Jackson believes employees may have been allowed to show up for the job but not required to work.

“We don’t pay individuals to come in and sit at the shop,” Jackson said. “They actually have to work to get paid. There are a lot of questions and having these [time] forms only raises more questions for me.”

Still other employees have been awarded vacation time for entire weeks.

The picture becomes murkier when considering one employee who, according to the accrual report, has only half an hour of sick time and no vacation time as of Oct. 21, thereby indicating that the employee had no more time to spend as of Monday.

One of the issues raising concern for Jackson is the fact that Selma Mayor Darrio Melton and City of Selma Public Works Department Director Steven Hendrieth signed off on all of time off – Jackson said that doesn’t jibe with their responsibility to ensure that departments are properly staffed.

“Our mayor and the department head, those that work in day-to-day operations, their first responsibility is to ensure that there’s manpower to do the job,” Jackson said. “It appears to me that they’re agreeing they’re allowed to do this.”

Jackson said that allowing every employee in the department to expend comp time simultaneously, thereby allowing the department to go unstaffed and its work undone, indicates that Melton and Hendrieth were “derelict in their duties.”

Further, Jackson noted that the city is currently without a qualified person to oversee human resource issues, such as those related to the accrual and use of comp time.

More than anything, however, Jackson regrets the situation that the department’s employees are now facing.

“I hate that the employees are in this difficult situation,” Jackson said. “They shouldn’t be in this situation. The mayor should communicate with the council…and allow the employees to know that the council is doing all they can to ensure that we have a sound budget and also adhere to their concerns. That’s the kind of leadership that we need, somebody that can convey that information.”