A. Purpose
The Catastrophic Leave Policy is designed to assist employees who have exhausted paid time credits due to serious or catastrophic illness, injury or condition of the employee or their family.  This policy allows other employees to make voluntary grants of time to that employee so that they can remain in a paid status for a longer period of time, thus partially ameliorating the financial impact of the illness, injury or condition.

B. Program Eligibility
Leave credits may voluntarily be transferred from one or more donating employees to another receiving employee under the following conditions:

  1. The receiving employee is a permanent full or part-time employee whose participation has been approved by their department head;
  2. The receiving employee, and/or the employee’s family member, has sustained a life threatening or debilitating illness, injury or condition. (The department head may require that the condition be confirmed by a doctor’s report);
  3. The receiving employee has exhausted all paid time off;
  4. The receiving employee must be prevented from returning to work for at least thirty (30) days and must have applied for a medical leave of absence.

C. Transferring Time

  1. Vacation and holiday time may be transferred by employees in all work groups. Comp time may be transferred by employees in work groups 1, 4, and 5.
  2. Sick leave may be transferred at the rate of 1 hour of sick leave for every four (4) hours of other time (holiday, vacation, MOT or comp time).
  3. Donated time will be converted from the type of leave given to sick leave and credited to the receiving employee’s sick leave balance on an hour‑for-hour basis and shall be paid at the rate of pay of the receiving employee.
  4. Donations must be a minimum of eight (8) hours and, thereafter, in whole hour increments.
  5. The total leave credits received by the employee shall normally not exceed three (3) months; however, if approved by the department head, the total leave credits received may be up to a maximum of six (6) months.
  6. Donations approved shall be made on a Catastrophic Leave Time Grant form signed by the donating employee and approved by the receiving employee’s department head. Once posted, these donations are irrevocable except as described in paragraph #7 below.
  7. In the event of the untimely death of a Catastrophic Leave recipient, any excess leave will be returned to the donating employees on a last in/first out basis (excess leave would be returned to the last employee(s) who donated).

D. Appeal Rights

Employees denied participation in the program by the department head may appeal the decision to the Human Resources Director and the County Manager whose decision shall be final.

The County shall address changes to the Catastrophic Leave policy through a County-wide process. The County will prepare a modified policy and present it to all labor organizations for comments at the Benefits Committee in 2019.

2015-03-23