FORT SCOTT - What started as an effort to update the nearly quarter-century old Bourbon County Employee Policy and Procedure Manual, originally adopted in 2002, has resulted in discrepancies in employee personnel records and dozens of upset county employees.
Work on updating the manual, which is often referred to as “the handbook” in meetings and conversations, began in earnest in 2025. The new manual, titled the “2026 Employee Human Resource Manual - Bourbon County, Kansas”, was formally adopted by the commission on Jan. 15 of this year.
Prior to adoption of the new manual, the county commission adopted Resolution No 51-25 during their Dec. 18, 2025 meeting. The resolution, written as an amendment to the 2002 manual, created a phased-in approach to help employees transition from the old handbook’s frontloaded vacation/sick leave system to a new accrual based system. It also made official that any accrued vacation or sick leave an employee had at the end of 2025 would be carried forward into 2026.
Taken directly from the resolution:
a. Transition Year - Calendar Year 2026“In preparation for the full implementation of a standardized monthly accrual method, and in recognition that employees were not previously prepared for a one-twelfth (1/12) vacation accrual system, the following transitional accrual method shall apply for calendar year 2026:
- Any remaining vacation or sick leave will carry over at the end of 2025 for the 2026 fiscal year.
- At the beginning of Calendar year 2026, the County will honor past practices of frontloading all vacation for employees who have met their two-year anniversary as of the beginning of 2026.
- Employees who have not met their two-year anniversary by January of 2026 will continue to accrue their vacation each month after their 6-month probationary period. If an employee reaches their two-year anniversary during the 2026 calendar year their vacation time will continue to accrue through the end of 2026 and then transition to the new procedures in 2027.”
More verbiage is in the resolution outlining how vacation time will be handled in this transition year, including rehire dates for payroll and benefits purposes.
However, language further in the resolution states
“…this amendment is effective immediately as of January 1, 2026, and shall remain in effect until formally incorporated into and approved as part of the updated Bourbon County Policy and Procedure Manual.”
Those two statements are in conflict, as the resolution was never formally incorporated into the 2026 manual. Because the resolution states it remains in effect only until it is formally incorporated into an updated policy manual — and that manual has since been approved — the transition rules it established may have ended when the new manual was adopted on Jan. 15.
Prior to the adoption of the new manual, hourly employees were not allowed to carry over vacation time from one year to the next, but were able to carry over a maximum of 120 hours of sick time.
Dozens of employees from across county agencies have reported accrued sick leave (and in some cases vacation time) seemingly vanishing overnight since the adoption of the new manual in January, despite Resolution 52-25 being adopted to prevent that very scenario.
Additionally, some employees have discovered changes to their hire dates in the new PayEntry payroll system, in some cases affecting both their accrued sick leave and vacation time. District 5 Commissioner Mika Milburn-Kee told the Bourbon County Monitor that the actual hire dates have not changed, even though it may appear that way to some employees. She said that the PayEntry system keys accrual for benefits on the field labeled as “Hire Date”, but there is another field in the system where the actual hire date is input.
According to Kansas Department of Labor (KDOL): In Kansas, earned Paid Time Off is generally considered part of wages if the employer’s policy or employment contract provides for it. While state law does not mandate PTO payouts, if a company policy states unused vacation is paid upon termination, it is considered compensation. Companies must follow their written policies.
According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), while employers, including county governments, can generally change PTO policies, they cannot retroactively take away accrued PTO, and they are usually required to provide notice before changes take effect. Policies must typically be applied prospectively, and unexpected changes without notice may violate state wage laws regarding earned compensation.
A lack of notice is what many employees have complained about, although Milburn-Kee said county commission Executive Assistant Laura Krom or Human Resources Consultant Dr. Steven Cohen notified every employee except those whose supervisors preferred to do the direct communication themselves.
In speaking with employees across multiple departments, including Emergency Medical Services (EMS), Public Works, the Clerk’s office, and the Sheriff’s office, they claim they only found out about losing their time or their hire dates changing by seeing it on their paycheck information and in the PayEntry system. Public Works employee Tanner O’Dell stated he had lost 35 hours and 15 minutes of sick leave during the April 13 county commission meeting, which was attended by between 30 and 40 employees with similar claims.
One EMS employee had 24 hours of sick leave on their last paystub in January, only for it to be gone on their next check. EMS Director Teri Hulsey said her hire date had been changed from the correct date of April 2019 to January 2022, which is when she officially became EMS Director.
Both County Clerk Susan Walker and Milburn-Kee have said that with various people doing payroll and personnel records over the last several years there were issues with consistency and parity among some employees. Because of the inconsistencies, Krom conducted an audit of all employees. The Bourbon County Monitor could find no public record of the audit being discussed in open meetings until after it was already completed.
Commissioner David Beerbower told the Monitor that he did not hear about the audit until it was already under way, and believed Milburn-Kee had directed Krom to perform the audit in her then-role as Payroll Liaison. Commissioner Gregg Motley told the Monitor he did not hear about the audit until after it had already been completed.
Milburn-Kee said that the records had to be corrected so that all employees are treated equally. Beerbower, Motley, and Commissioner Joe Allen have publicly said they don’t believe that taking away accrued leave from employees due to bookkeeping errors - some made several years in the past - is fair to employees.
The US Equal Opportunity Employment Commission advises it is not legal to change the hire date in employee records. Employers are required to maintain accurate records that reflect the correct hire date. Changing the hire date can lead to legal consequences and may violate the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and other employment laws. Commissioner Milburn-Kee said that the changes to some employees were part of getting PayEntry to accrue the benefits correctly, but other dates were incorrect in the previous system. It is not known how many employees had their dates manually modified.
An area of omission in both the 2002 and 2026 manuals concerns salaried employees. When a county employee is paid salary (exempt status) he or she has unlimited sick and vacation time. Their time off is not recorded as it is for hourly (non-exempt status) employees.
Upon implementation of the 2026 manual, long-time county employees Bobby Reed and Alvin Metcalf, who had changed from exempt status to non-exempt status, said their start dates for leave accruals changed to the dates they became hourly. For Reed, this caused the PayEntry system to reduce his total time with the county from 16 years down to 2. During the April 20 county commission meeting, the commission voted unanimously to restore the records for both Reed and Metcalf based on past precedent.
During the April 13 meeting, which was attended by an estimated 30-40 county employees, Commissioner David Beerbower introduced a resolution that would revert the County back to a front-loading based leave system, with a grandfather clause that would revert all employees back to the total leave they had as of December 31, 2025. That resolution was tabled and then brought back for discussion at the April 20 meeting, where it was tabled again after a lengthy and at times heated discussion. A revised version of the resolution is on the agenda for tonight’s commission meeting.
During the April 20 meeting, both Motley and Allen said that they wanted leave accruals to be retroactively set to where they were on December 31 2025 out of fairness to employees. The Bourbon County Monitor will continue to cover this story as it develops.
