Council opens review of personnel policy after staff raise overtime, grievance and leave concerns

City staff and several council members on Aug. 4 told the Newport City Council they want more work and public discussion before the council adopts or finalizes changes to the city's personnel policy. Council President Kevin Charbonneau opened the agenda item by describing a multi-stage review process the council had authorized earlier and noting council members had invited both written and verbal input from staff and the public. Charbonneau said staff were welcome to testify in the open meeting because the discussion was a policy review, not a personnel evaluation. Several employees spoke. Frank Cheney, identified in the meeting as a city staff member, asked the council to consider changing vacation and personal-day language and said current accruals “are not very, giving” and that “some personal days instead of 36 days might be worthwhile.” Police Chief Travis Bingham said he and department foremen are concerned about how overtime is handled for nonunion employees and contrasted that with the progressive disciplinary and grievance processes in union contracts. “Why isn't it like that for non‑union personnel?… To me, it should be the same way as that,” he said. Another staff speaker raised the lack of a grievance process for nonunion employees and said, “We have no course to grieve anything.” City clerk and treasurer Jim Johnson also described how nonunion overtime is treated differently in practice from union overtime in situations like holidays or compressed work schedules. The council then went into attorney-client executive session with municipal counsel John Klesh to discuss legal questions and privileges related to the policy review. After returning to open session, Charbonneau summarized the council’s direction: no final action, assignment of focused follow-up questions to individual council members and a promise to avoid informal two-member working groups that could raise open-meeting-law concerns. Charbonneau said the council’s follow-up inquiries will include how overtime is handled, VLCT (Vermont League of Cities and Towns) best-practice guidance, grievance and discipline procedures, and how the 2014, 2023 and Feb. 2024 personnel-policy drafts differ from current practice. He told the public the council plans at least one, and possibly multiple, public sessions to discuss substantive policy topics. No policy change was adopted; the council instead directed members to collect information and return with public‑facing sessions so that staff and residents can comment before the council considers formal action.