In an effort to help county employees with sick leave, the Lincoln County Board of Supervisors changed its personnel policy earlier this week.

District 4 Supervisor Eddie Brown made the motion to amend the policy to allow an employee to donate his or her vacation time to a fellow employee to use in cases of sickness.

“It’s only in cases of sickness,” he said. “We’re not going to open it up to say, ‘I’ll give you time and you can take off and have you two or three weeks vacation.’ We’re just going to do it for sick time, in dire need.”

County Administrator David Fields explained that in 1998 an amendment was made to the personnel policy that allowed an employee to donate sick time to another employee, not annual vacation time.

“I think (Brown) has a man that has some vacation time he’s going to lose and wants to donate that, but the policy doesn’t specifically say you can donate your vacation time,” Fields said. “It only says sick time.”

Brown said he is making the amendment because he has an employee who underwent knee surgery, but has almost used up all of his sick time.

“I want to hang on to him because he’s a good hand,” he said. “Hopefully, this will help.”

The board unanimously passed the amendment. 

In other board business:

• The board approved a request from the Lincoln Civic Center Commission to allow an on-call employee to bring home a county truck in order to respond to problems at the facility when that employee is off duty.

• County engineer Ryan Holmes presented the board with a map of the fire protection districts. He explained the layout of the map, with the help of fire coordinator Clifford Galey. Holmes and Galey discussed with the board the possibility of revising the map in order to shrink each fire station’s response area.