A proposed rule from the U.S. Department of Labor is causing great concern among local governments and the education community – and it should. The changes, if implemented, will result in a reduction in services and benefits provided to employees, students, and taxpayers.

My conclusion comes from decades of personal experience in local government and education. I spent eight years representing Colorado’s 32nd district as a state legislator, where I chaired the House Finance Committee. For the last four years I served as a trustee for Adams State University and am on the council for the City of Thornton. With local governments and schools already working with tight budgets, many cannot afford to pay employees overtime.

The proposed change is to the Department of Labor’s Fair Labor and Standards Act.

Under current provisions, salaried workers making over $23,660 per year can work outside a traditional, “clock-in-clock-out” work schedule. This means that salaried workers can work from home, utilize flex hours, put in extra hours to work for a promotion, and work until a job is finished. The DOL’s new rule would raise this minimum threshold to $50,440. Presently, many local governments have been hiring accounting firms to see if they can keep operating at this level and what adjustments must be made.

The findings have not been promising.

In the administrative world of government, these changes are pivotal – what happens when a taxpayer can’t access property information because the county clerk already put in 40 hours?

Anyone who has worked in education would also find this unsurprising. While teachers are exempt from these regulations, there are plenty of others who contribute to a child’s education that are not. The administrative staff that are crucial to your child’s education would be effectively capped at 40 hours a week. This means that just like the clerk, your child may not get their transfer credits processed on time because the local school had a particularly busy week.

I have no doubt in my mind that this policy was drafted with the intent of furthering the well-being of hard working Americans and protecting them from predatory employers. The problem that I, and so many others familiar with the finances of government and education have, is with the unintended consequences. Vital services operating on tight budgets can only operate successfully with the flexibility of a salaried worker. The proposed rule needs to be corrected to accommodate these economic realities.

This is an impending disaster that Congress has the power to stop. I urge the Colorado congressional delegation to understand the implications to their constituents if the DOL’s overtime rule is implemented. In order to do the right thing, the DOL must revisit the drawing board and provide a solution that won’t put such a burden on employees and services provided by local governments and schools.