Salt Lake County to reimburse workers after classes finished

Instead of paying up front, Salt Lake County will now reimburse employees who attend college classes only after those classes are satisfactorily completed.

The policy change, approved by the County Council on Tuesday, is in response to problems with employees collecting county tuition money, dropping courses and not paying the county back.

"This is significant progress in a short amount of time," chief administrative officer Doug Willmore said.

Other problems have included insufficient oversight of the program, sloppy bookkeeping and other missteps. The program coordinator, based in the county's personnel office, numerous times took tuition assistance and then dropped the classes. She has since been disciplined.

The council pushed the change through in expedited fashion in order to have it in place for employees signing up for summer classes.

Some 20 employees already have signed up for summer classes under the old program, whereby they are given their tuition money up front. As does the new, the old program covered 75 percent of the cost of classes if the employee completed them with a C grade or better. If they didn't, they were expected to return the money.

The policy change does not affect those few employees, but officials said the change is still timely, in that "we get requests every week," Willmore said.

Not everyone completely agreed. Councilman Randy Horiuchi, as a then-county commissioner, several years ago helped make the program an up-front assistance system in order to accommodate employees (he used single mothers as an example) who don't have sufficient cash flow to pay for tuition up front.

While supporting the reimbursement scheme in principle, Horiuchi wants the county to continue to assist cash-strapped employees up front, according to need.

"I would feel bad if we went totally to reimbursement and left people out," he said.

That idea met with mixed responses.

"Randy is to be applauded," Willmore said. "His heart's in the right place. But we can't be everything to everybody."

Councilman Mark Crockett said there are several programs for people in such situations.

Council members say there are several details in the new policy they want to change — including, perhaps, Horiuchi's need-based system. But for reasons of timeliness, they opted Tuesday to adopt the policy and then tinker with it later.

Tuition reimbursement programs are increasingly common among both public and private employers. Among all the government tuition programs studied by Mayor Peter Corroon's staff, however, Salt Lake County's — until Tuesday, at least — was the only one that paid at the beginning of classes instead of the end.

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