At the recent Perry City Council meeting, it was decided that the City would take whatever steps are needed in order to retain staff considered “non-essential” while services are limited due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Perry City Administrator Sven Peterson says the focus of the resolution was their part-time employees who have been out of work since the closures began. He emphasized that taking care of those employees would be good for morale, and would also save the time and money it would take to train new workers. “Especially (at) the library and rec center, we have a good number of regular part-time staff people at those locations. So we didn’t want to just lay them off and kick them to the curb necessarily, so we really wanted to make sure that we were able to take care of them during this time. Hopefully we’re able to retain them and keep them on board for when we reopen, because we are very hopeful that we’ll get open soon.”

The Council approved the resolution, which will pay the employees their average wage over the last six pay periods through the next two pay periods. To learn more about this and other topics involving the City of Perry, click the link below to listen to the recent Perry Fareway Let’s Talk Dallas County program with Peterson.

https://www.raccoonvalleyradio.com/2020/04/07/lets-talk-dallas-county-4-7-2020-sven-peterson/