ARTICLE 14
ANNUAL LEAVE

SECTION 1 - GENERAL

Annual leave is a right of the employee and not a privilege.
Consistent with the needs of the Agency, annual leave, which is
requested in advance, will be approved. It will be the
responsibility of the supervisor, in consultation with the
employee, to schedule annual leave to insure that annual leave is
scheduled for use so as to prevent any unintended loss at the end
of the year. When requested, employees will normally be advanced
annual leave not to exceed the amount that can be accrued during
the leave year.

SECTION 2 - CONSECUTIVE VACATION TIME

For vacation purposes, supervisors will attempt to schedule
workloads and annual leave in a manner which will permit each
employee, if he or she wishes, to request up to two consecutive
weeks in each year. Approvals of such requests are subject to
the needs of the agency.

SECTION 3 - RESOLVING CONFLICT

In the event of a conflict of annual leave scheduling among
employees at a given duty station, Service Computation Date (SCD)
will govern, in the absence of personal hardship. SCD will be
used on a rotating basis.

SECTION 4 - LEAVE USAGE INCREMENTS

Annual leave may be used in increments of 15 minutes.

SECTION 5 - EMERGENCY ANNUAL LEAVE

To request emergency annual leave, an employee will contact
the leave approving official as soon as possible, but normally no
later than two (2) hours after the start of the Center's standard
tour of duty. Normally, an employee is expected to personally
contact the appropriate leave approving official to request
emergency annual leave. Under unusual circumstances, a
supervisor will accept such requests from an intermediary.
However, if an employee makes repeated requests for emergency
annual leave, he or she may be required to personally contact the
appropriate leave approving supervisor with such requests.