North Pole council gives utility workers an hour of leave for each on-call day

The North Pole City Council voted 7-0 Monday to give the city's four on-call utility workers an hour of leave for each day they're on call, after rejecting Mayor Larry Terch's push to cut it to half an hour.

One of the workers is on call each week to keep the city's utilities running around the clock, and they're paid only if they're called out. "We get nothing for just being on call," utility worker Randy Binkley told the council when it introduced the measure Oct. 5.

At an hour a day, that works out to about 91 hours of leave a year for each worker, Terch said. Will Hawryluk, the city's chief financial officer, said the new leave for all four workers would be worth $24,331.92 if they cashed it out, or $5,200 to $7,500 each, depending on wages. He said that cost isn't in the proposed 2027 budget.

Terch said it hadn't been done before, and half an hour would still give each worker 45 1/2 more hours of leave a year, on top of the 261 or 263 hours they already get. "Leaving it at the full 1 hour would cost the city around $24,000, and something is better than nothing," he said.

Council Member Thomas McGhee said employees accept on-call duty when they take the job, but he backed the full hour. He warned that police, fire or administrative staff could ask for something similar. "When we do something for one, it doesn't take very long for the other departments" to ask, he said. He added that the council was "feeling generous because we live in North Pole and Christmasland."

Council Member Jordan Schuster answered that conditions have changed since the workers signed on 10 or 15 years ago. "If other departments or other organizations that they could go work for are doing it, it's something that we should offer as a benefit," he said.

Terch also pointed to recent raises for utility workers. Schuster said those raises were catch-up pay after the workers had been left out of an earlier one.

Only Council Member Aubrey Barnett joined Terch in voting for the half hour, and it failed 2-5.

The council then voted 7-0 for another Terch amendment, raising the cap on banked on-call leave from 80 hours to 91, a full year's worth. That made more sense than "an 80-hour random number," he said.

Council Member Santa Claus, who co-sponsored the measure, read a letter from Binkley, who couldn't attend. "It seems like a fair compensation for us for being restricted and staying available to respond to utility emergencies," the letter said.

The council also agreed, without a vote, to have the city attorney revise an on-call agreement the workers will be asked to sign. The draft barred them from leaving the North Pole area. Schuster said that meant they couldn't even go out to dinner in town. Terch suggested "the Fairbanks North Star Borough within a 30-minute drive" instead.

The measure started as comp time, and the council introduced it 6-1 on Oct. 5, with Terch voting no. At the Oct. 19 meeting, the city attorney said that version mixed up comp time, which city code ties to hours actually worked, with an on-call policy. A rewrite creating a separate on-call leave bank had reached members shortly before that meeting, and the council adopted it and put off the final vote.