H. B. 4516
(By Delegates Guthrie, Ennis, Mahan, Brown, Higgins, Yost, Caputo
and Hatfield)
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[Introduced February 13, 2008; referred to the Committee on the
Finance.]
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A BILL to amend the Code of West Virginia, 1931, as amended, by
adding thereto a new section, designated §5-5-6, relating to
allowing certain state employees with at least five years of
continuous state service to be paid for unused sick leave days
in excess of fifty days once per year.
Be it enacted by the Legislature of West Virginia:
That the Code of West Virginia, 1931, as amended, be amended
by adding thereto a new section, designated §5-5-6, to read as
follows:
ARTICLE 5. SALARY INCREASE FOR STATE EMPLOYEES.
§5-5-6. Payment for unused sick leave.
(a) Every currently employed full-time state employee who has
accumulated at least sixty-five days of unused sick leave may be paid, at his or her option, for unused sick leave in an amount of
days as designated by the employee not to exceed the number of sick
leave days that would reduce an employee's sick leave balance to
less than fifty days. The employee shall be paid at a rate equal
to one quarter of their usual rate of daily pay during that
calendar year. The "daily rate of pay" of an employee paid a
monthly salary is calculated by multiplying the monthly salary by
twelve and dividing that number into the number of workdays for
that calendar year. As used in this section "workday" does not
include weekends, holidays or other periods of normal noncountable
time.
(b) Any person that was employed by the state as of the first
day of January, two thousand six, and his or her job was
subsequently eliminated because of a shift of those job duties to
a non-governmental employer, shall be deemed a state employee for
the purposes of this section. Employees eligible for reimbursement
pursuant to this subsection shall have the option of applying the
value of those unused sick days at one hundred percent of cash
value to pay for medical insurance or to add service time for the
purpose of calculation of retirement benefits.
(c) Payment for unused sick leave may be made only once per
fiscal year on either the pay day immediately following the first
full pay period in July or the first full pay period in December.
Payments shall be made out of the fund established in subsection
(e).
(d) Payments shall be made in the order that eligible
employees apply for the payments so long as funds are available.
In the event the fund is insufficient to pay all employees who have
applied for payment in a fiscal year, employees who do not receive
payment are eligible for payment in the next fiscal year, are not
required to reapply and shall receive payment in the order that
they first applied in, unless the employee chooses to withdraw the
application prior to the next fiscal year.
(e) Effective the first day of July, two thousand nine, there
is created a special revenue account within the State Treasury to
be known as the State Employee Sick Leave Fund which shall consist
of moneys appropriated by the Legislature. The State Auditor is
responsible for the administration of this fund.
(f) The State Auditor shall adopt procedural rules pursuant to
article three, chapter twenty-nine-a of this code to implement the
provisions of this section. The rules shall include, but not be
limited to, provisions for the application and the application
process.
(g) Each spending unit, as defined in section one of this
article, shall verify to the Auditor an employee is eligible for
payment under this section and shall verify the number of unused
sick leave days for all employees at least once per year. The
Auditor shall maintain sick leave records for all spending units.
All sick leave days that an employee is paid for as provided in
this section shall be deducted from the employee's sick leave balance by the Auditor and the Auditor shall verify to each
spending unit the amount of days that have been deducted from an
employee's sick leave balance. An employee shall not be permitted
to reacquire any sick leave days that he or she received payment
for under the provisions of this section.
NOTE: The purpose of this bill is to
allow state employees
hired prior to July 1, 2001 to be paid for unused sick leave days
once per year; including those employees who have had their jobs
eliminated since January 1, 2006.
This section is new; therefore, strike-throughs and
underscoring have been omitted.