Clayton County will soon put some extra money into the pockets of public safety workers who put their lives on the line during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.
Leaders in the south metro Atlanta community agreed earlier this week to use some of the millions of dollars in CARES Act funds it has received to give full-time EMT’s, police officers, firefighters and others on the front lines of the pandemic a one-time $2,000 hazard pay bonus.
Essential workers who don’t work for public safety but were still required to come to work will get $1,500 while part-time employees will get around $500, the county said. Final cost estimates have not yet been determined.
“At the end of the day, this was the right thing to do,” said Clayton County Commissioner Felicia Franklin Warner, who has been a strong supporter of the pay. “It needed to be done.”
Clayton’s decision comes months after several other metro area communities, including Smyrna, Atlanta and Henry, Cherokee, DeKalb and Fulton counties, approved millions in hazard pay for workers on the front line back in April and May. Private businesses, including Home Depot, RaceTrac and AT&T, also increased wages or offered one-time bonuses to employees who worked while most of the nation was in a shutdown.
Clayton turned down a proposal to do the same in April citing budget constraints during a county commission meeting. Instead, the county said the employees would be compensated by adding extra hours to their annual leave packages.
“We did it like that because we didn’t have the money to pay ... without having to dig into the fund balance,” Clayton Commission Chairman Jeff Turner said. “We were hit with a lot of lost revenue when it came to the loss of tourism and court fines. And because we did not know how long this was going to last, we thought it was prudent to keep our resources intact.”
That changed when the CARES funds starting trickling down to medium-size counties such as Clayton, which is slated to receive $12.2 million in CARES funding, according to Gov. Brian Kemp’s office.
“When we found out that money can be used for hazardous pay, that’s one of the first things that we decided we were going to do,” Turner said.
The pay will likely be available to workers in September, the county leaders said. About 1,950 employees are eligible for the payment, which is for hours worked between March 16 and May 11.
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