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LOCAL
March 17-23, 2016 » Page 2A
County roads and drainage workers want a raise, too
by Andrew Cauthen
Andrew@dekalbchamp.com
DeKalb workers who
take care of the county’s
roads and drains are upset
that they were not included
in a 4-percent pay raise re
cently approved by county
commissioners.
“It was dead wrong for
them to exclude us out of the
4-percent raise,” said An
thony Cade, general fore
man in the stormwater divi
sion of roads and drainage
and a 30-year employee.
On Feb. 25 county com
missioners approved the
DeKalb 2016 budget, which
includes a 4-percent pay
hike for police, fire, 911,
sanitation and watershed
employees. The salary rais
es, which will affect approxi
mately 2,800 employees, will
go into effect in May.
“We are a vital part of
[the] roads and drainage [de
partment] of DeKalb Coun
ty,” Cade said. “We keep the
streets open. We keep the
citizens happy and we try to
take care of the citizens in a
timely manner.”
Cade said his fellow
workers are upset with the
“way that they treated us
over the past eight years—
we haven’t had a raise, the
pension has gone up, the
insurance has gone up.
“I think it’s time that they
need to come out and actu
ally see what we do for a
living,” Cade said. “They
should give us a 4 percent
raise.”
Jeffery Stanley, a se
nior equipment operator
who has been working in the
roads and drainage division
for a decade, said, “I feel
that the 4 percent increase
that was given to the five
departments was unfair to
roads and drainage because
I feel we are the first re
sponders to everything.
“If there’s a [road] wash
out going on, they call roads
and drainage,” Stanley said.
“At three or four o’clock in
the morning,...they call roads
and drainage to get a tree
up. Anything that may hap
pen emergency-wise, we
have a crew. We’re always
open. We’re always there.
“The little approval that
[commissioners] gave to
those five departments was
unfair for us. We should
have been...included in that
raise,” he said.
Calvin Alexander, a
senior equipment operator in
the roads and drainage divi
sion and a 19-year DeKalb
employee, said, “We need
to be considered as one of
the first responders. The
firefighters call us. They are
always calling us for every
thing. E911 is calling us all
the time for assistance.”
“Being excluded from the
4 percent pay raise is wrong
on every level and a hard
slap in the faces of roads
and drainage employees,”
Alexander told commission
ers March 8.
“We respond first to the
county’s first responders to
help and enable them to re
spond to their calls,” he said.
“During the 2014 win
ter ice storm, we kept the
county’s road prepped for
the safety of the constitu
ents,” Alexander said. “We
freed emergency vehicles...
that were stuck so that they
could respond to their calls.
We rescued the school
buses from an elementary
school so that they could be
driven home.
“We clear trees from
roadways year-round,” he
said. “We support firefighters
with our equipment to put
out fires.”
He also told how roads
and drainage crews worked
on Christmas Day because
of snow and ice.
Alexander said he was
“crushed” when commis
sioners did not include roads
and drainage employees in
the pay hike.
“I thought the commis
sioners really knew about
roads and drainage, but they
don’t, because if they had
we would have been includ
ed before [everyone] except
the police,” he said.
At the March 8 commis
sioners meeting, Commis
sioner Sharon Barnes Sut
ton introduced a resolution
to give a 4 percent pay raise
to all county employees, ex
cept those who just received
one.
“This covers all the em
ployees under the purview
of the CEO,” Sutton said. “I
want to be responsive to the
needs of our employees.”
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