The Sheridan City Council held a study session on December 8, 2025, with a light agenda covering three discussion items: updates to the employee handbook, a review of the city’s future land use plans, and a preliminary review of the Bucking Iron Business Park subdivision plat. The meeting also included a general discussion of future items led by the city administrator. No formal votes were taken; all items were presented for council discussion and feedback.
Oh, okay. I heard that. Okay. Stand for Punch, please. Super States of America. And just for all. Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the December 8th, 2025 General Study Council meeting. We have pretty light agenda tonight. We have three items and then anything that we want to discuss at the end. For all those people in the audience, if I get up and label it alert, it's because I miss my holy day of obligation mass at noon, so I gotta go at six o'clock tonight. So it's not that I'm mad. Just gotta get the church. I gotta replay. Yeah. So on the item number one, discussion of the employee handbook updates, and with this is our resource director, Heather Doe. Welcome. Good evening, Mayor and Council. We do this at least once a year and sometimes twice. This is twice this year for me up in front of you. So we have a couple of changes that we're making to the employee handbook. Obviously, the first one is every time we change it, we change the dates throughout, so it'll have um the effective date of next Monday when it is is up for vote on the handbook. Uh the second one is probably the most um significant of the changes, I would say. So we are in the process of getting a new time and attendance system and a new payroll system. So with that, we have been looking forward to, and a lot of our employees have been looking forward to the ability that we will have to add compensatory time off to our time off offer offerings. For those of you who aren't quite sure what compensatory time is, public employee employers are able to offer this. So if an employee works overtime, they can choose either to be paid overtime, time and a half for that time, or they can change it to compensatory time. So for every hour of overtime they work, they can change that into one and a half hours of time off to use at a later time. So we have obviously put some parameters on this. Um we're able to put those parameters, so we are making sure that our employees during the fiscal year can only have up to 40 hours of compensatory time. And then at the end of the fiscal year, if they have any hours left of that, we will pay those out. Um reason being is usually every year people get a raise, and so you don't want to be earning it at one rate and paying it out at another rate. Um that would would there would be some budget cost to that, but the way we're doing it, there won't be any any difference between paying out time off or doing compensatory time. In fact, if people use it as compensatory time, it will actually be less of a burden on the budget because they will use that time instead of being paid a time and a half. So uh again, like I said, we have um quite a few employees that are looking forward to this. Uh December 21st is when we go live with the system. So um we have been training our employees and it's gonna be a lot of fun. It's the week of Christmas, but that's just how it happened happens to be. So anyway, uh that is on page 17, so I've added in that compensatory time off policy. And then the other one that we're changing is on page 20. Um, our current handbook says that if somebody doesn't come to work, no call no show for two days, that we terminate them. Really, if they don't come to their job, they've they've kind of chosen not to have a job. So we're just kind of changing the wording on that. We're actually changing it to three days instead of two. Um that if uh we have an employee that doesn't call in for three consecutive days that we'll consider that they have resigned from their job. And we don't just sit around and wait for them to call us either. We obviously try to get a hold of them. Um even I mean, I worry about our people. So if they don't show up for work for two days, I'm calling Travis's department and I'm sending them to your house to make sure you're okay because I'm not okay with not knowing if people are okay or not. So I've had a couple people really mad at me about that, and I'm okay with that, because I uh anyway, so we're changing that one in the handbook as well.