Dispute over supervisors’ pay leads to court case
At one point in the past year, the auditors of Buffalo Township deemed their township supervisors’ labor to be worth less than a buffalo nickel.
As part of a long-running dispute, supervisors’ compensation for administrative duties, toil related to road maintenance and plowing snow was set by the auditors, for a time, at $0.00 per hour.
That’s not a typo.
In a complaint filed this week in Washington County Court, the supervisors of the rural township with about 2,100 residents west of Washington accused the board of auditors of acting out of “personal animosity” without a “basis in law or reason.”
Supervisors Jack Levy, Timothy P. Doman and Donald Lachman, who took office between 2012 and 2016, are seeking sanctions against auditors Bob Krut, Bob Buchanan and David Locy, who have served since the beginning 2016 and 2017.
In court documents related to the dispute, Solicitor John T. Hofrichter cited a section of Pennsylvania’s Second-Class Township Code that states auditors are to determine pay “which shall be comparable to compensation paid in the locality for similar services.”
Before 2016, a township supervisor who held a commercial driver’s license and worked as a member of the road crew was paid $17 an hour. Supervisors who were members of the road crew but did not have a commercial driver’s license made $16. A supervisor who was secretary-treasurer was paid $450 a month, and the member of the board who was designated as open-records officer received $150 a month.
During the first week of January 2016, the auditors set Lachman’s pay as roadmaster at $17 an hour but cut the other supervisors’ pay, setting their wage for road crew work at $15 an hour, regardless of whether the worker held a commercial driver’s license.
Doman, as treasurer and secretary, was to receive $10 an hour for each of those positions, and Levy was to be paid $10 an hour as open-records officer.
The supervisors, through Hofrichter, notified the auditors later that month the compensation was not comparable to what was being paid locally. According to a spreadsheet filed with the court, Hofrichter gathered information on wages paid by eight area townships. North Franklin, for example, pays its secretary-treasurer, on-call road crew members and right-to-know officer $23.50 an hour, while Blaine pays $17.50.
Last March, the auditors met again and slashed each supervisor’s wage to zero dollars.
That summer, the supervisors tried to negotiate their wages, and the auditors countered by setting the secretary-treasurer’s pay at $150 a month, or a $75 split if one person were secretary and the other were treasurer.
Hofrichter said in an interview the supervisors also were paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 per meeting attended, but the court case, known as a mandamus action, “has nothing to do with that.” He described the predicament as “a bit of a power struggle” that has to do with “the way (the auditors) want to have the township run, as in, ‘We don’t think you should do this job, let the secretaries do this.'”
Because of the impasse, the supervisors said in their complaint Buffalo taxpayers have had to pay “unnecessary and unreasonable sums” to litigate and readvertise an additional auditors meeting.
The supervisors asked the court to direct the auditors to pay them at rates comparable to those of adjacent municipalities; to pay the costs of litigation; and sanction them to reimburse the township for the cost of advertising the extra meeting.
Attempts to reach the members of the board of auditors by phone Thursday afternoon were unsuccessful. Hofrichter said the auditors could either ask the court to appoint legal counsel or hire their own lawyer.
No court date has been scheduled.