In August, the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled against the city and 11 other municipalities and in favor of the Kentucky Labor Cabinet.
The case was an appeal of a Franklin Circuit Court ruling that said the agencies were not immune from paying retroactive overtime after an overtime calculation was changed in 2009. The appellants were 10 cities, one county and one fire district.
Charles Wheatley, a Covington-based attorney who has represented the Nicholasville firefighters, said the deal was fair to all parties involved.
“The 44 current and former Nicholasville firefighters are pleased to have reached an agreement with the city over back wages owed to them,” he said. “All things considered, it is a fair settlement, one that both sides should be pleased to have reached an amicable resolution on.”
Battalion chief David Cartwright said the city’s firefighters unanimously voted to accept the deal.
Meyer said once the city secures the loan, current and former firefighters involved will receive a lump-sum payment.
Nicholasville Fire Chief Charles Brumfield said his department will work around the agreement to make sure firefighting needs are taken care of but manpower would not be affected.
“It will affect our annual budget, but it’s something that we will just have to get around and absorb it in other areas and spread the expense out,” he said. “We don’t anticipate anything like (layoffs). It may delay some of the capital projects that we were wanting to get completed.”
In 1980, the Professional Firefighters Foundation Program Fund was established, in which firefighters in Kentucky became eligible to receive educational-incentive pay each year for participating in a state training program. That money is distributed by participating local agencies but comes from the state.
Firefighters accumulate 48 hours of scheduled overtime in each three-week work period. Questions have centered on whether the educational-incentive money should be incorporated into calculations for overtime.
In 2009, the Kentucky legislature changed the law to clearly state that the training pay was to only be incorporated into calculations for unscheduled overtime and not regularly scheduled extra hours. But firefighters have claimed they are owed back pay for previous years when the pay was not included in overtime calculations.
The appellants in the Supreme Court case had contended they were immune from having to provide lost wages since the educational-incentive money came from the state and not the local agencies themselves.
The Supreme Court opinion, written by Justice Daniel Venters, claimed the statutes governing the incentive pay “did not intend to cloak city or county governments with governmental or sovereign immunity from the very liability that the statutes expressly placed on them.”
Editor’s note: Staff writer Jonathan Kleppinger contributed information to this story.
