GREENE: County Board holds end of year meeting
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By Carmen Ensinger
Members of the Greene County Board met for one final session before the end of the year on Wednesday, Dec. 26 to take care of some end of the year business.
The board approved off on Aflac doing the county’s cafeteria plan, which Greene County Clerk Debbie Banghart explained is a plan where an employee is able to withhold money from their paycheck to pay into an accidental death insurance policy or something similar.
“This is something we have had even before I came to the county,” Banghart said. “When David Marth retired, he was the last one we had on what we called the ‘cafeteria plan’, but we did have some people on the Aflac plan.”
Once Marth left, the county no longer offered the “cafeteria plan” but they still had employees who were on the plan through Aflac and therefore had to offer the program.
“Aflac came in and said they would offer the plan and it wouldn’t cost us anything,” Banghart said. “If we were to offer the plan ourselves, it would cost us too much money. We could hire our accountant to do it and take care of it or our insurance agent, but Aflac is now going to do it for nothing.”
At the suggestion of Greene County States Attorney Caleb Briscoe, the board took no action on the quarantine policy. For the past couple months the board has been discussing a possible change to the current policy regarding an employee who must be absent from work because of illness, specifically COVID related.
Up until Oct. 1, any employee who had COVID or had to be in quarantine because of another family member who had COVID, received their pay without the need to use their sick days or vacation days and the county received some form of reimbursement from the state and/or federal government.
However, that reimbursement ended on Oct. 1. The current county policy on being absent from work states that an employee must either use a sick day or vacation day or they will not be compensated for being absent on that day.
The board was trying to come up with some sort of policy that would have helped employees who were new employees who might not have any accrued vacation or sick days which would still be fair and equitable to current employees.
After approving off on the end of the year bills, board members approved off on applying for a USDA grant to replace the windows in the courthouse.
“This grant for the windows was really part of the ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) money, but it had to be separated out and couldn’t be included in with the HVAC grant we applied for,” Banghart said. “Therefore, we had to apply for a separate grant for the windows.”
Board members signed two letters of support for the Rebuild Downtowns and Main Streets Capital Grant program – one for Greenfield and one for Carrollton.
Greene County Sheriff Rob McMillen was appointed, by the board, to the West Central 911 board.
