News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
Putnam County approved an actuarial study on a new form of retirement pay for the sheriff’s department at Monday’s County Commission meeting.
Sheriff Eddie Farris said the state recently passed a law for hazardous duty pay that adds ten percent to the retirement pay of commissioned deputies and corrections officers. Farris said that pay would begin either at retirement or when an employee hits the age of sixty.
“Then when you reach full social security age it would drop off,” Farris said. “So that’s how that would work. Ten percent don’t sound like much, but it is something that would certainly help. And it would help me continue to retain people and recruit people to come to work.”
Farris said his department has some 220 employees who will be affected when that pay is approved by the county. The financial study will cost the county $400.
“Hopefully we’ll be back in front of you next month with those figures and see if we can get something accomplished,” Farris said.
Farris said Putnam’s corrections officers are not included in the pre-established bridge bill, which provides its own twenty-two percent increase to retirement pay for sheriff’s deputies and firefighters. Farris said he previously chose to exclude corrections because those employees have higher turnover rates and it gives deputies a place to work after they are forced to retire at age sixty-two.
Commissioner Jonathan Williams said corrections workers should be included in the bridge bill as well as this new hazardous duty pay.
“In sheriff’s offices around the state, there are a lot of deputies who begin as corrections officers,” Williams said. “They work three, four, five years inside the jail. Those years, under the way we’re doing it now, would not count toward their bridge benefit. But if they go ahead and do the bridge for everybody, then it all counts. That’s not what we’re dealing with tonight, I just wanted to say that to you publicly.”
Williams said frontline paramedics and EMTs should be included in the hazardous duty pay as well. Farris said he does not disagree, but the new system was designed and approved by the Tennessee Consolidated Retirement System.
In other business, the commission approved the sale of four old ambulances as surplus from the county’s EMS. The commission also approved the appointments of Randy Shelton and Sandy Martin to the E-911 board.
