Sisters police officers are working with the Sisters City Council to hammer out a policy on overtime accumulation.

The issue of pay for "comp time" blew up into a dispute between City Administrator Barbara Warren and Sisters Police Chief David Haynes last month that lead to the temporary resignation of the police chief.

Warren asked for a council workshop on the matter after the dispute.

She said that the heart of the matter is an unusual buildup of compensatory time in the police department and a vague city policy dealing with such matters. She said the accumulation of time has never reached the level it is currently and has not previously been an issue.

It has not been the policy of the city, Warren said, to regularly pay for overtime. Police officers are expected to take compensatory time off, instead.

City staff members, including three police officers, met with the council Tuesday, July 10, to find ways of keeping overtime accumulations in check. The policies of other local governments were passed around, but little attention was paid to them. Instead, the council listened to comments, mainly from police officers, on how the time has built up and what some of them recommend as a solution.

Chief Haynes was not present at the meeting.

Warren said the "comp time" issue is not a problem in any other city department. She said their duties and work scheduling are usually handled in standard eight-hour days, Monday through Friday. The police department is on a round-the-clock schedule with officers working four 10-hour days per week.

Detective Don Pray said the accumulation of "comp time" in the police department comes mainly from officers having to be in court or to attend training sessions on their days off. Officers also accumulate time for holidays worked.

Present city policy is that employees must be paid for more than 240 hours of accumulated "comp time," according to Warren. She said none of the officers has accumulated that much at this time.

Pray said officers are not particularly interested in being paid for their "comp time." He said a clear policy with a limit of how much time can be accumulated would be sufficient. He and other officers also expressed the need for a policy on work scheduling that would allow personnel to take full "comp" days off as opposed to taking off an hour or two at a time.

Several ideas were offered, but the consensus seemed to settle on setting an annual limit on "comp time" to as little as 70 hours and having employees share in the responsibility of scheduling time off.

The officers will discuss their ideas with Chief Haynes and come up with a plan to present to the council.