Horry County Council sweetens pandemic bonus pay for public safety staff
Horry County Council members on Tuesday voted unanimously to increase bonuses paid to county public safety workers, using money from American Rescue Plan COVID-19 relief funds.
Police, firefighters, EMS crew, 911 dispatchers, sheriff deputies and correctional staff who work at the J. Reuben Long jail will receive an additional $1,000 bonus, on top of a $1,500 bonus all county employees will receive.
The workers deserve a higher bonus because they were front-line workers, council members said.
“They all still had to report to work, they had to spend the extra time, the extra public exposure, out there and I think we should help them along and recognize that,” said County Council member Al Allen, who retired from the Horry County Sheriff’s Dept. in the early 2000s.
County leaders initially planned to pay all county employees $1,500 each — for a total cost of $4.25 million. On Tuesday, as council members discussed how to spend the county’s $68.8 million allocation from the Rescue Plan, Allen motioned to increase that bonus pay for public safety personnel only to $2,500.
Those bonuses will be one-time payments made later this month to county employees.
The move comes as other coastal cities in South Carolina, including Charleston and Georgetown, have voted to issue bonuses to all of their employees using funds from the American Rescue Plan.
The discussion to increase the bonus pay came amid a broader discussion about how Horry County will spend nearly $70 million from the American Rescue Plan.
Barry Spivey, the county’s assistant administrator, estimated that the additional pay would range between $1 million and $1.2 million and said he and his staff would provide council members with a formal calculation tomorrow.
The funds come out of the county’s $6.9 million contingency fund that’s part of its spending plan for the Rescue Plan money. That pot of money is meant to be shifted to various priorities set by county officials.
Spivey said the bonuses would be prorated for public safety employees who joined the county after March 2020, and that part-time employees would get half of the bonus pay.
The county’s most recent budget shows 1,041 employees in the public safety division, though not all of those employees may qualify for the bonus.
The county has made other recent moves to boost employee pay during the pandemic, including granting all county employees a 3% raise in its current budget, and paying a bonus to employees who didn’t use all of their allotted days off during the pandemic. That buy-back program cost the county around $2 million, Spivey said.
Ultimately on Tuesday, the council voted to approve spending Rescue Plan funding on the employee bonuses, waste management facility upgrades and several in-house technology upgrades.
Some spending proposals, including those for beach bathrooms, beach parking, county facilities and road projects, were sent back to the council’s administration committee for further discussion.
