Officials Claim Fiscal Proposals ‘Micromanage’

BLOUNTVILLE, Tenn. – Two cost-saving measures coming before the Sullivan County Commission have angered elected officials who claim commissioners are trying to micromanage their financial affairs.

Sheriff Wayne Anderson said Tuesday he is solidly against a resolution sponsored by County Commissioner Buddy King of Bristol that aims to require county departments to get prior approval for overtime pay their staffs incur.

“We have to work overtime,” Anderson said as he objected to King’s resolution. “We don’t have enough help to do it any other way.”

The sheriff’s office must send officers on patrol 24 hours a day and also must maintain a certain number of guards at the jail each day, Anderson said. The office relies on overtime pay to cover situations where deputies must work extra hours to investigate a major crime or cover shifts missed when a colleague gets sick or goes on vacation.

Anderson said his office includes money to cover overtime pay in its budget each year and the county commission approved that overtime allotment in September when it approved the overall county budget.

“I just don’t think it’s right for the county commissioners to micromanage my budget,” Anderson said. “The people of Sullivan County elected me as sheriff and I’m responsible for making sure my budget is well spent.”

King’s resolution would limit overtime pay to only what it called “emergency situations.” The county commission’s budget committee would be responsible for determining whether one of those situations existed and whether the department could pay its employees overtime for extra work.

“That’s all we deal with is emergencies,” Anderson said. “Do we call them at three in the morning and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got a homicide [or other emergency] here, can we work overtime?’ ”

Without prior approval from the budget committee and whatever other committees supervised their operations, these department heads would have to give their employees compensatory time, or let them take off at a later date whatever hours they work above a 40-hour week.

“The purpose of this is to try to control some of the spending that we’ve been doing,” King said Tuesday when he presented his resolution. He said the state government has taken similar steps to cut expenses.

Shortly before King presented his resolution to the commission at its regular Tuesday meeting, Commissioner John McKamey of Piney Flats discussed a resolution that seeks to curb travel costs. That plan would require all county employees to get prior approval for trips they make out of the county.

McKamey said Friday that it does not make sense to send people on special trips “as tight as everything is.”

But the resolution quickly drew fire from Mayor Steve Godsey who said it would prevent him from going to Nashville where he could meet with the region’s legislators to ensure that the county gets what it needs from state government.

“It appears to me that you’re trying to micromanage [my affairs],” Godsey said as he discussed McKamey’s resolution Tuesday.

The commission’s three standing committees will discuss both resolutions during the first week of March. Commissioners will vote on the proposals at their next regularly scheduled meeting, at 9 a.m. March 16.

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