Franklinton town employees will have to work a little longer for their money after aldermen stripped five paid holidays in an effort to reduce costs.

Paid holidays for town employees were reduced from 12 to seven. Lost in the shuffle were Good Friday, Veterans Day, the day after Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and a fair during the Washington Parish Fair. Some employees had split that holiday into two days, only working in the morning on the Thursday and Friday leading up to the fair to avoid the inevitable traffic jams that accompany the event.

There’s two ways to look at it,” Alderman John Daniel said. “In the police department it’s probably going to save somewhere around 10 to 20 thousand dollars over a year’s period of time. In the police department if a town holiday is declared by the town council police get double time and a half.

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“The second side of that is the other people that normally would have had a paid holiday would now have to come to work on that day because it’s not a holiday anymore. It can cut down on some of the hiring required on holidays and that sort of thing.”

Town holidays will include New Year’s Day, Martin Luther King Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas Day.

Board attorney noted that the staff would have to use a vacation day to take off any of the previous holidays.

“If it gets to the point where everybody wants to take off the supervisor will have to make the decision,” Mayor Wayne Fleming said. “We are looking for ways to get the budget in line.”

Besides the estimated savings to the police department, Daniel said he could not place a figure on the savings to the other departments.

“I feel like it will save us some money,” he said. “It hasn’t been done in several years. “We’re just like everybody else. We have a lot of things coming up. Health care, insurance is up, everything else is going up. Same thing with Bogalusa. We just have to tighten our belts.”