Murphy City Council Work Session - February 17, 2026
Murphy City Council Work Session - February 17, 2026
The council convened a work session to discuss personnel policy amendments, the vehicle equipment replacement fund (VERF), an electric vehicle (EV) charging station grant, and FY26/27 personnel requests. Staff provided detailed presentations and recommendations. No formal votes were taken, but council members expressed support for proceeding with several items.
Discussion Items
- Personnel Policy Amendments (presented by HR Director): Proposed changes to five policies – compensation establishment (clarifying annual evaluations), overtime calculation (reverting to actual hours worked only due to cost overruns – overtime increased from $482,000 in FY23 to $799,000 in FY25), donated leave (changing from a per-year limit to a per-case limit), military leave (complying with HB 2513 for fire shift employees), and cell phone allowance (aligning policy with current practice for employees hired before Oct. 1, 2024). The changes are scheduled for council approval on March 3, 2026, effective March 7, 2026.
- Vehicle Equipment Replacement Fund (VERF) (presented by Finance Director Myrna): Reviewed the three-year lease program, FY27 replacement schedule (13 vehicles and equipment planned), and cost comparisons between a Chevy Tahoe and a Tesla police vehicle. Projections show a Tesla could save $62,000 over eight years compared to a Tahoe kept for eight years. The fund is paid by department contributions. FY27 VERF contributions are estimated at $982,000.
- EV Charging Station Grant (presented by Philip and Carter): The city has been approved for a $411,200 federal grant through NETCOG for four Level 3 DC fast chargers at the police department (publicly accessible, with one police-priority stall). A private vendor will cover operations and maintenance costs. Installation requires initial outlay of ~$387,000, 100% reimbursable over five years. Council gave direction to proceed; formal acceptance and agreements will come back for action.
- Personnel Summary FY26/27 (presented by City Manager Adams): Reviewed mid-year reclassifications in FY26 (total cost savings of $31,500 to the general fund and $12,000 to the utility fund). For FY27, departments requested four new police officers, an assistant police chief, an assistant public works director, and crew leaders. Staff recommended two new police officers, a reclassification of two lieutenants to captains (cost-neutral), the assistant public works reclassification, and two crew leaders. Council indicated general support for these recommendations.
Key Outcomes
- Council directed staff to proceed with personnel policy amendments for formal approval on March 3, 2026.
- Council verbally approved continuing the VERF lease program as presented.
- Council gave the go-ahead to accept the EV charging station grant and bring back formal agreements.
- Council concurred with the city manager's FY27 personnel recommendations, including two new police officers and the reclassifications, to be incorporated into the upcoming budget workshop.
Meeting Transcript
None we are adjourned. Time is 711. All right. We are going to reconvene into work session. Are we going to do this in the community room? Yes. All right. In the community room. Five minutes. Oh, okay. Is personnel overview the same? Is this one? No, that's not the same. Oh, okay. It's it's the last one. It's the personnel policy amendments. And I apologize. Is it like in the back? It's in the back. It's in your packet. It's at the very end. I apologize. I did not print this one. Oh, we're only in the packet. I'm sorry. I apologize for that. The other one there, but this one's not. Um okay. So there's only five uh uh person policies that we're recommending um some adjustments to. The first one is section three uh three point zero two compensation establishment. So currently promotions and lateral transfers require a six-month introductory period where the employee is evaluated every 90 days. The only uh adjustment that we're recommending adding, same thing, but just making it clear that once that employee reaches their one year mark, um, they are required to have an annual eval, where at that point they'll be eligible for a merit increase, of course, depending on budget availability. So, why that change? So, this is our current practice anyway, it just wasn't written in policy, so we just want to make it clear in policy so that way um there's clarity for our employees and our supervisors, and of course, consistent application. Any questions on that? Change. Okay. Okay, so the next one, the the biggest one here is overtime work section 3.11. So currently that would adopted about a year and a half ago. Um currently holiday leave, vacation, bereavement, military, and jury duty all counts as hours worked for the purposes of calculating overtime. So you may have you may remember us making that change um a little over a year ago. Um so because uh there's a few reasons why we are recommending to revert back to the original policy where only overtime was uh calculated based on actual hours worked. The reasons for that is because um we've kind of noticed that since we've adopted this policy over time, overtime costs have exceeded what we've projected. Um and so if we keep we realize that if we keep going in that direction, then it will cause a significant financial impact to the city. As you can imagine with this new policy, it has um resulted in difficulty um having being able to clearly um and accurately forecast and control overtime. Um and then for those who don't know, there is a federal mandate that went out that allows a tax deduction for overtime earnings, but only for worked hours only. So because currently we allow overtime um to be reflected on worked and non-worked, it puts an administrative burden on the finance department to have to split that out to split to manually split out worked and non-worked. Um so those are those are the primary the reasons why we want to make that change. Any questions on that one? So what is typically done with like industry-wide?
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