Findlay finance committee recommends ordinance changes to formalize timekeeping, asks for clarified resolutions

The Findlay City Finance Committee on April 12 reviewed a draft revision to the city's salary ordinance that would require salaried employees to record their work time and would set expectations for hourly staff to use an electronic clocking system.

Mr. Feitner, who drafted the ordinance at the committee's request, said the proposal includes general language so the policy will remain operable as the city's timekeeping platform changes over the next decades. "Salary folks need to track their time using the timekeeping system," he told the committee, and the draft assumes nonexempt employees would use a clock-in/clock-out process such as ExecuTime.

Committee discussion focused on implementation details and safeguards. Members asked whether supervisors could be granted flexible clocking for managerial staff and pressed for clear limits on the types of access granted to human resources and other administrators. Participants distinguished two separate concerns: routine adjustments to employee time records (which committee members agreed should be resolvable by HR or department supervisors with appropriate logs) and programming- or table-level access to payroll logic (which they said must remain tightly restricted to avoid accidental or improper changes to pay calculations).

A committee member requested that the wording in Section 8 be amended to match Section 10 so similar employee categories are treated consistently. Members also asked that the two companion resolutions be revised to make explicit that any administrative access is for personnel or troubleshooting actions only and does not include the ability to change programming, coding or payroll logic.

The committee agreed to recommend the ordinance proceed to readings with the requested edits; members discussed including emergency language so the measure could take effect upon signature if council chose that route, while acknowledging readings need not be waived. The auditor's office and HR staff will rework the draft language on Section 8 and return the resolutions to the auditor's office for review before the next meeting.

Next steps: the committee directed staff to prepare the revised ordinance and clarified resolutions for presentation at upcoming readings and to bring any union feedback into implementation discussions. No formal council vote on the ordinance was recorded at the committee meeting.