The Walden board, in continuation from the last meeting’s appointments, voted to re-appoint Marisa Kraus as village clerk during its April 16 meeting and considered establishing regulations that would maintain each village employee’s responsibilities.

Trustee Ralph Garrison Jr. proposed that every village employee, such as the clerk or treasurer, should adhere to their daily tasks based strictly on their respective job descriptions. He argued that if an employee takes on responsibilities that were not assigned to them, they may lose time to perform their primary duties.

“If the reappointment goes through, the duties of the clerk would be the specified duties in the job description with no additional duties. Therefore, everybody in the office stays strict to whatever the job description is in that appointed position on paper,” Garrison explained. “If the deputy clerk handles payroll, the deputy clerk will be handling payroll. If the clerk handles FOIL requests, the clerk will handle FOIL requests.

“What happens is people take on other responsibilities and then they don’t have enough time to get to their actual tasks,” he continued.

Trustee Liza Kyle suggested that the board should modify individuals’ job descriptions to account for tasks or responsibilities that village employees were not assigned but perform anyway.

“If they have a very good rhythm of how things are done in the office and they’re not necessarily done by the specific person, maybe it’s worth looking at the job responsibilities and altering them instead of altering what people do on a day-to-day basis,” Kyle said.

Pearson argued that cross-training is very important for village employees to learn, especially if one employee becomes ill or leaves for an emergency and someone else needs to take over for them.

“I do believe it’s very important in a small office. They all need to know things,” she said. “Maybe someone is sick or something happens, somebody has to fill in that space.”

The board did not come to a decisive conclusion with this discussion but voted anyway to re-appoint Kraus.
Village Manager John Revella confirmed on April 23 that there were no issues with cross-training village employees, as they need to cover each other in the event of illness or vacation.