Councilman Wayne Mascola has voiced his frustration with the speed of converting township employees to Edison’s relatively new automated timekeeping system.
Mascola brought up the topic during the Township Council meeting on Nov. 9 by asking Business Administrator Maureen Ruane for an update regarding the process of moving all township employees to the system from vendor ADP. Mascola has been asking Ruane regularly for updates at past council meetings.
At this most recent meeting, Ruane responded that while many township employees are using the system, those in supervisory roles are not while she works with legal counsel regarding potential issues.
It was an answer that didn’t sit well with Mascola, who said if there were concerns about using the system, those concerns should have been explored before the township made the purchase.
He said at a cost of $300,000, he didn’t feel the township was getting its money’s worth, and timeline-wise, the township was a year behind where it should be in moving to the ADP system.
However, township attorney Bill Northgrave came to Ruane’s defense, explaining that he had been advising Ruane regarding the matter.
“We’re in a world where everything is going to be subject to a public record act, and everything’s going to be used in ways that are not necessarily in the township’s interest, and we want to be sure it’s in the township’s best interest,” he said, explaining that for example, litigants have used timekeeping records in lawsuits.
One of the primary issues Ruane said she is facing with the migration is that supervisory employees like herself do not always keep regular hours that are easily captured by a timekeeping system. She said the township has to establish a procedure for tracking the time an employee spends working if he or she has to take a call in the middle of the night or handle an issue when he or she is not scheduled to be on the clock.
Ruane stressed that the intention is for all employees, including supervisors, to use the system in some form in the future.
“There is not going to be anybody here that is not going to have their vacation, sick and personal time accounted for in this system of ADP somehow,” she said. “It’s just [determining] how we’re going to implement all the different structures that we have.”
Ruane said she intends to have the issue remedied by the end of the year.