MANSFIELD, Ohio — Mansfield City Council denied a request for a $10,000 education reimbursement to Safety-Service Directdor Lori Cope during Tuesday night’s meeting.
Council voted 7-0 to remove a line item from the 2016 temporary budget for college tuition costs. Third Ward Councilman Jon Van Harlingen made the motion.
“My concern is we don’t want to start a precedent with elected officials and highly (placed) appointed officials,” Van Harlingen said. “If we’re going to do it for one, we would have to do it for all.”
Cope declined comment.
After performing some calculations, Van Harlingen found the city’s general fund revenue increased five percent between 2012 and projections for 2016.
“For our temporary budget right now, we’re showing a 17.4 percent increase in our expenditures,” he said. “Coming out of fiscal emergency I think we learned some things that I hope we do not forget between the administration, finance department and we as council as we prepare the final budget.”
According to the City of Mansfield personnel policy and procedure manual, each full-time, regular non-bargaining employee with at least one year of service since the employee’s most recent hire date is eligible to apply for reimbursement of tuition and other costs of instruction voluntarily undertaken by the employee subject to the following conditions.
As part of the conditions, the course must be a technical or business post-high school level course at an accredited institution or an undergraduate or graduate course at an accredited college or university. The course must also be directly related to the duties and responsibilities of the employee’s present position or the duties and responsibilities of the next higher position in the normal career path within the employee’s department, the manual states.
Van Harlingen said this reimbursement “is not something that anybody really takes advantage of,” adding that those who do are typically lower-level employees trying to work their way up.
He stressed he does not object to department heads like the police chief or fire chief receiving college tuition reimbursement, but he does question the reimbursement for elected officials and their top-level appointees, which would include the safety-service director.
“I just feel it’s sad at this time that we are between a rock and a hard spot,” First Ward Councilman Mike Hill said, adding that even though he will approve the amendment, he’s not happy about it.
Councilman At-Large Cliff Mears said he heard from many people about this issue who expressed their concerns.
“It turned out that it struck a nerve with a lot of people,” he said. “The public opinion affected the way I will vote.”
Council then approved the amended budget for final passage in a 7-0 vote.
