The Haines Sheldon Museum Board is investigating the legality of a proposed “staff bonus program” that would supplement museum employee salaries with a percentage of contributions from fundraisers.

The board briefly discussed the draft proposal, floated by museum executive director Helen Alten, at a meeting Tuesday.

According to the proposal, for museum fundraisers with a pre-set monetary goal, any money raised exceeding the goal would be split evenly between staff and the museum. “The money will be dispersed to each staff member based on the amount of time they work at the museum and the number of staff receiving a bonus,” Alten wrote.

For example, if there were $1,000 in funds exceeding the goal and four staff members working at 40, 30, 20 and 10 hours per week, they would each receive $400, $300, $200 and $100, respectively.

For fundraisers without a pre-determined monetary goal, 10 percent of the money raised would be distributed to employees based on the amount of time the employee works for the museum.

Board member Gregg Richmond seemed apprehensive of how members of the public and museum supporters might interpret the program. “I think you’ll probably have a major perception issue with it,” he said. “Can you imagine having an auction and somebody bidding $200 and saying, ‘Jeez, I’m not going to bid more because it’s just going to go half to the staff.’”

Richmond said he’s seen countless auction items raise more money than they were actually worth because the bidders only cared about the funds going to the organization.

“Something that has very little value, someone will be having fun bidding against somebody else, and they will go to wild extremes to buy it. They don’t care, they’re giving the money to the organization. Here, if their perception is that’s going to the staff, that may change that bidding pattern,” Richmond said.

Board member Kelleen Adams disagreed, saying she personally wouldn’t have a problem with an organization using fundraised money for staff. “If I go to an auction and I’m at a fundraiser and I see something I want, I’m there just to raise funds, just to help. If it’s for the museum, I’m there to help the museum. And if that money goes to a bonus program for the staff, then that’s why I was there,” Adams said.

Executive director Alten acknowledged there might be a perception problem, but said the staff bonus program is designed to incentivize employees to work harder at fundraising. Board president Jim Shook said it could be used “to try to keep our staff… because they’re getting paid nothing.”

Much of the board meeting, which lasted more than two-and-a-half hours, revolved around staffing, wages and hours. Alten said she would rather offer staff better wages than implement the bonus program, but those wages are bound by union negotiations, which are under way between the borough and the Local 71 union.

“Right now, they are negotiating with the borough. Nobody knows what is going to be set, but everybody in the borough is angry about salaries,” Alten said.

Alten said she received an email from interim manager Brad Ryan saying the staff bonus program “might be a problem.”

“You have to be careful,” Ryan said in an interview Wednesday. “There’s a proper way to do that and you have to be careful it goes through PERS (Public Employees’ Retirement System) and gets all the right taxes taken out and it’s paid like a wage. It can be used as wages but it has to be done appropriately.”

Board president Shook said he would meet with Ryan to discuss the legalities of the program.

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