EATON — Tenured mployees of Preble County will continue to get five weeks of vacation for the foreseeable future. During the Board of Commissioners Meeting on Monday, Nov. 19, Commissioner Rodney Creech presented a proposition for six weeks of vacation to his fellow commissioners.

It was a request originally brought to him two years ago, that certain county employees earn six weeks of vacation — instead of only five — when they have worked in their position for so long. The request was recently reiterated to Creech, so he wanted to broach the topic with the board.

“Two years ago, it was asked if tenured employees could have more vacation time,” Creech said. “I talked to Connie [Crowell] about it two years ago, and we are meeting the Ohio Revised Code standard. We are meeting our commitment, but this email was sent to me two years ago, I addressed it, and it got brought up again. They are asking for six weeks, instead of five, if you have ‘X’ amount of years.

“My big issue is, with short staffed offices we’re increasing overtime,” Creech said. “With big counties, this might work, but on a small county with tenured employees, you’re increasing overtime and workload. I think five weeks is beautiful. I wanted the three of us to discuss it.”

“A lot of our offices are skeleton staffed,” Commissioner Denise Robertson said.

“Five weeks of vacation is a lot of vacation. They have sick days on top of that,” Commissioner Chris Day said.

“I just wanted to bring this up. I told him, we have some offices with two people, so an additional week’s vacation would kill us,” Creech said.

The board agreed the amount of vacation would stay at five weeks.

In other business, commissioners also accepted EMA’s EMPG grant application, which will reimburse the county for 50 percent of the operation cost of the EMA Office.