County Adopts Cell Phone Policy

Highlands County's first written policy on employee cell phone use, adopted Tuesday by the county commissioners, is designed to provide better oversight and could lead to cost reductions.

About 150 of the nearly 400 county employees are provided with county cell phones, at a cost that totaled $55,700 for the year that ended June 30.

The new policy provides two options for department heads to supply their workers with cell phones. They can continue providing a county owned cell phone, or offer a monthly $25 allowance to use their personal cell phone for work calls and list it for county business.

County Administrator Michael Wright said he expects that some county cell phones will be eliminated when the need is reviewed on a case by case basis by department directors in the near future.

"We haven't taken a close look at it, and it's something you should do from time to time," he said. "We're going to take a hard look at every phone and see if they're really needed."

The cost to the county would be about $10 cheaper per month under the allowance plan, Wright said. But, he said, this option will probably be offered to a relatively small number of employees.

It would benefit the county and the employee when the worker has minimal use during working hours or is put on call after work hours in case of emergency, he said.

The new policy puts in writing what was a verbal understanding, that personal calls on county cell phones "should be both infrequent and non-routine." It also specifically prohibits calls to "personal entertainment," numbers, calls for commercial or "for profit" activities, and any call for a political purpose.

Under the new policy, employees with county phones will get a statement listing their calls every month, have to mark which ones were personal, and reimburse the county 10 cents per minute for those calls.

"I think people will be more aware of it," Wright said about the restrictions on personal calls because of the record keeping required under the new policy.

While the record keeping requirements are strict, Wright said, "it's the nature of public service, you are often held to a higher standard than you might be in the private sector."

The policy was written by a three-member committee appointed by Wright of Bill Nichols, Emergency Operations Center director, Eddie Cardona, traffic operations supervisor, and Sherri Bennett, risk management director in the human resources office.