On January 10, the Cook County Board of Commissioners approved an addition to the county’s employee policy that would supplement worker’s compensation for elected officials who cannot work due to a work-related illness or injury.
Personnel Director Janet Simonen brought the issue to the board, saying that regular employees can elect to supplement worker’s comp with paid sick leave, vacation time, comp time, or other paid leave they have accrued so that they continue to receive up to the same amount they were earning when they were working. Worker’s comp pays about two-thirds of an employee’s regular gross wages and is not taxable.
Elected officials, such as commissioners, the auditor-treasurer, the recorder, the county attorney, and the sheriff, receive a salary but do not accrue paid time off for sickness or vacation. A memo from Simonen to the commissioners states, “…If they are on worker’s comp, they are only receiving two-thirds of their normal wage and are not able to supplement their income in the same manner as all other county employees.”
She recommended that the board add the following paragraph to its employee policy: “An elected official who receives worker’s compensation payments without having access to paid leave, vacation, sick leave, extended sick leave, or comp time hours to supplement said payments shall be paid an additional taxable wage by Cook County so that the combination of worker’s comp payments and county wages will approximately equal the official’s average base salary.”
Since salaried elected officials are not required to put in a certain number of hours each week and could continue to get their regular salaries even if they weren’t spending time on the job as usual, Commissioner Fritz Sobanja said, why would they apply for worker’s comp? Simonen said constituents might not want to see elected officials get paid when they are not working.
Worker’s compensation claims involve administrative costs and raise insurance rates, Sobanja said. Simonen answered by saying that the county is self-insured, so it ends up putting back into its insurance pool what has come out of it.
Commissioner Bruce Martinson pointed out that an elected official who was hurt two months before his or her term was up, for example, could continue to get worker’s comp after his or her term was up, whereas if he or she continued on salary, the salary would stop when the term was up.
That, again, would cost the county money, Sobanja countered.
The new policy would affect officials such as County Attorney Tim Scannell, who was a victim of the December 15 shootings at the courthouse.
Despite Sobanja’s remonstrations, he voted in favor of the policy change along with the other three commissioners in attendance. Commissioner Jim Johnson was absent due to non-work-related medical treatments.
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