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TAMPA - Tony Fernandez says he didn't know he had been bumped from Hillsborough County government's extended sick leave program until he needed to use it two years ago.
Complications from gall bladder surgery forced him to miss about six weeks of work in 2001. Only then did he learn that he had been removed from a county sick leave bank provided to some employees in place of short-term disability pay. Fernandez, 55, had to eat the lost wages.
Now Fernandez has cancer. Facing a potentially long treatment regimen, he is protesting the county's refusal to make an exception for him and workers who may be in the same predicament.
"I've got friends who have stepped in to help," he said. "Financially, it's hard."
Fernandez, a Marine veteran who served in Vietnam, does electronic work for the county Water Department. He is married with a grown son and makes about $46,000 annually, living largely paycheck to paycheck, he said.
He is enrolled in a sick leave program at the county that has since been replaced with a policy that includes short-term disability. Employees were allowed a one-time chance to choose between the programs when the new policy went into effect in 2000.
The old policy didn't include short-term disability. Instead, employees were given the option of participating in a program in which they periodically donated a day of sick leave into an overall bank of hours that could be tapped by workers needing extended leave.
Fernandez stuck with the old policy because it allowed employees to carry over their sick leave from year to year. It also allowed them to receive cash for a portion of the unused leave time when they leave the county.
At the time, employees in the original sick leave program were told they didn't have to do anything to remain in the old program. But an employee committee that oversaw the sick leave bank realized at the time that its membership rolls needed updating.
So a decision was made to get employees wishing to remain members of the sick-leave bank to reapply so that its rolls could be made current. Sandra Charbonier, chairwoman of the sick leave bank committee, said employees were notified many ways.
Enrollment notices were sent out on e-mail, in a county Intranet system and in a county newsletter. Payroll workers in each county department were asked to notify employees.
"I feel for him," Charbonier said. "I just think we have done everything possible." Employees are given an opportunity to re-enroll in the bank annually. However, they have to have at least 64 hours in unused sick leave and donate a day of it, an amount Fernandez doesn't have because of his gall bladder surgery and for taking time off tending to ill parents.
Charbonier said Fernandez was in an added position to be aware of the re-enrollment request. He was president of the union that does labor negotiations for many of the county's blue-collar workers: local 167 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME.
Fernandez says that partially bolsters his point. If he didn't know, others must be in the same position. He said the new sick leave policy came up in union negotiations that year, but not the enrollment requirement.
Like many employees, he said, he doesn't always see the county newsletter, Intranet postings or blanket e-mails. He said the committee should have notified sick leave bank members, just as they notified employees when the bank needed donated hours to replenish the pool.
Mike Temple, regional director for AFSCME, likened the situation to a home insurer canceling its coverage in Florida without notifying individual policyholders.
"You don't unilaterally take people out of a benefit plan that they have opted into and made premium payments into without notifying them," Temple said.
Fernandez has appealed to the committee to make an exception, and to the administration. His requests have been denied, a decision Charbonier said was largely made to be fair to other employees facing the same problem.
A survey showed that at least 77 people were bumped from the sick leave bank program, though the number may be inflated because it included some people who left the county.
- Bill Varian can be reached at 226-3387 or varian@sptimes.com