By Shelby Stewart
Staff Writer
Ortonville- At the Monday night meeting, the village council voted 4-3 to pay four employees $2,551 as a one time payment due to loss of the flex benefit stipend, which the personnel committee discontinued in favor of 3-5 percent raises for the four employees, as the flex benefit stipend was performance based and not guaranteed.
Council members Mark Robinson, Larry Hayden, Pat George and president Tonja Brice voted in favor of it while Coleen Skornicka, Dan Eschmann and Mark Butzu voted against it.
“The personnel committee discussed the flex benefit stipend, and agrees that it should be discontinued, however, it is through the compensation plan that it would offset the loss of the stipend this year,” said president Tonja Brice. “After review, it was found four employees, in various amounts, fared worse year over year. The total among the four employees was calculated to be $2,551, so the personnel committee unanimously recommends that the four employees be paid that amount as calculated.”
The issue was brought to the personnel committee by village manager Bill Sprague, who said he had gotten some complaints from a few employees who were taking a loss of income, despite the raises they had received.
“My take on this is, you’ve heard of a play on words, this is a play on numbers,” said Eschmann. “When this flex benefit stipend was introduced, it was a performance based stipend in lieu of a pay increase. We could not guarantee year over year pay increases, and the flex benefit stipend, one year over another, was never a guaranteed number.

Over the years, what took place was we gave a flex benefit stipend with no pay increase, and all of a sudden, we said you know what? we’re doing okay. We’re going to give that employee a small increase and still include the flex benefit stipend. So now, it’s assumed that we automatically give our employees that flex benefit stipend at the same time we’re giving very nice raises, which we gave them a raise. And we as a personnel committee at that time, it was me, Tonja and Coleen, we agreed that the pay increases were so large, much larger than the average employee would get for a pay increase, we said we were not going to include the flex benefit pay stipend because of the amount of the raise.”
Though the stipend was not guaranteed, it was said that previous village managers had told employees it was a guarantee, though it was communicated by Sprague to the employees that it was not.
Now we’ve had a chance to look at it, it doesn’t mean we can’t change things when we’ve made a mistake,” said Brice. “It means we see an error and we feel we should fix it, because the intention of us trying to do that was not to make them negative. The point was to say thank you very much, we’re giving you this raise. But it didn’t work out when we looked at them together, and we have people who are taking a cut in pay instead of a raise.”