Portage County employees will continue to receive longevity benefits as they have in the past.

The Portage County Board of Supervisors Tuesday, Aug. 16, voted not to override Portage County Executive Patty Dreier’s veto of the longevity language in a recently approved new salary schedule.

The motion on the floor was to override the veto; that motion failed 0-25 with all supervisors agreeing to maintain Dreier’s veto and allow longevity benefits to continue as they have in the past.

“What we did with longevity (in the past) makes a lot more sense than the ill-thought-out motion on the floor,” District 14 Supervisor Jim Gifford said.

County Board supervisors approved a new salary schedule July 19. The original resolution eliminated the longevity benefit based on the recommendation of the county’s consultant, who spent more than a year researching, interviewing and working on the study.

Supervisors amended the salary schedule resolution to include longevity in the individual’s base wage, and then at the individual’s anniversary when they reach the next step in the schedule, they would move forward two steps. The longevity amendment passed 21 to 1.

Wednesday, July 27, Dreier line-item vetoed the longevity amendment, and instead reinstituted the longevity benefit that existed prior to the salary schedule vote.

Dreier said under the supervisors’ amendment, a 30-year employee who is eligible for longevity might be at the ceiling of the salary schedule, which means that employee is frozen and no longer able to see a pay increase. By re-instituting the original annual longevity benefit, that same employee would still see the annual longevity benefit.

The veto also ensures that Highway Department employees would retain the longevity benefit, Dreier said.

District 23 supervisor Barry Jacowski, who was one of the leads in bringing the amendment to the floor, said Tuesday he changed his mind.

“After further review, it looks like we should not override this veto,” he said.

Prior to the vote, Chair and District 16 Supervisor Phil Idsvoog recommended not overriding saying, “I think the differences have been settled.”

District 12 Supervisor Dan Butkowski, who also is vice president of the Human Resources Committee, which spent months working on the salary schedule including the longevity issue, thanked the committee, county staff, the Human Resources department and the consultant for the hundreds of hours spent getting the salary schedule and the longevity issue handled.

About 275 of the county’s roughly 600 employees qualify for longevity payments, which were approved in 2011 for those employees hired prior to Oct. 1 of that year. Years of service determines what amount the employee receives annually.

Upholding the veto also will improve administrative efficiency when payroll and longevity comes due. The reason for the new salary schedule was in part to increase efficiency and eliminate the need to physically go into each employee’s file to ensure payments, Dreier said. The new salary schedule would operate on a computer system that would allow eligible employees to be identified through a program and those payments made on the anniversary and annual dates determined when the employees were entered into the system.