Several county commissioners pushed back against a proposal from the county’s highway department at Tuesday’s work session, as the department looked to make more than 20 personnel adjustments. County Engineer Cal Markert said due to some agenda mistakes during the county’s budgeting process this summer, some of the changes he wished to make to the department were not a part of the final budget. “We are still short some employees because these positions got non-funded even though I still had a person in some of those,” Markert said. “I know y’all are very cost conscious, but I felt like this was something we needed to bring to you. I don’t want to cause problems, but I do think these items area good thing.” The proposed changes would modify several positions within the highway department, creating newly updated positions but filling them largely with existing staff. County Commissioner Tucker Dorsey said he was firmly against the proposed changes. “These are promotions for the sake of promotions and raises for the sake of raises,” Dorsey said. “This is picking and choosing here and this is not how this is set up to work. I don’t think this is a savings at all, from a department that was over budget for last year.” Commissioner Frank Burt, who served as budget chairman for this year’s budget, told Dorsey it could have been a savings if handled during the budget process. “I believe it would have been a savings had we acted on it as they presented it,” Burt said. Commission Chairman Chris Elliott joined Dorsey in questioning the plan. “Not handling this during the budget is my primary objection to it,” Elliott said. “We spent a lot of time over the summer making decisions on this budget, and these 24 different line item changes are significant ones to an already past budget. I’m happy to have this conversation, painful and laborious as it may be, but the budget discussions are the appropriate time to handle something like this.” Commissioner Skip Gruber said he recalled the positions coming up during the budget talks but that they somehow never were brought forward. “I don’t think any of this was ever carried forward,” Gruber said. “When we finished with him, we asked if there was anything else and said all of this stuff was fine. That was my remembrance of it.” Due to objections from Dorsey and Elliott, the item was removed from the commission’s consent agenda and will be fully discussed at next week’s commission meeting. “Let’s discuss it in front of God and everybody, which is good with me,” Burt said. “And we won’t go away angry with each other no matter what happens.”