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City Manager Lori Ann Farrell Harrison has named Payroll Supervisor Anna Dowleski as the recipient of the latest City Manager Leadership Award.
“As a full-service City, Payroll in Costa Mesa can be a very complex operation,” City Manager Farrell Harrison said. “But with Anna in charge, I have complete confidence that everything will run smoothly. She is such a valuable member of our team and I’m honored to present her with this award.”
As the Payroll Supervisor, Dowleski provides her expertise and analytical abilities for the labor contract negotiations. Upon adoption, Dowleski works with IT and Human Resources to ensure the labor contracts are correctly implemented in the City’s payroll system.
She is diligent, detail oriented, and is passionate about ensuring Costa Mesa’s staff are correctly compensated. Her passion and strong work ethic are to be commended.
During COVID, Dowleski took the lead for Finance on setting up the payroll processes to ensure City staff could electronically track their COVID time correctly for cost recovery reporting.
She is also the lead to ensure that the COVID sick time approved by the Federal Government during the COVID shut down period is fully reimbursed. During this period of time, she successfully navigated the Internal Revenue Services inquiries related to tax submittals, proving yet again her detailed day-to-day processes and strong internal checking systems work.
Aside from the normal bi-weekly payroll processing efforts, Dowleski also ensures the City transmits the correct CalPERS payments, State and Federal Taxes, and all health benefit payments biweekly. She also processes W-2’s annually, a long and arduous process in the beginning of each calendar year.
She always avails herself to all City staff for any payroll-related inquiries. In fact, she makes sure to personally meet with each new employee and explain payroll. She also meets personally with each staff member who are planning to retire.
Further, as a full-service City, with complex Police and Fire schedules, she has a thorough understanding of those safety payroll complexities, and is able to ensure that the City’s payroll system correctly captures those complex formulas.
For many years, Dowleski was the only staff member in the payroll office for the City. Throughout her many years in payroll, she worked with Information Technology and Human Resources staff to create specialized payroll modules to ensure that the payroll processing is fully automated; thereby reducing error and ensuring proper internal controls are in place for payroll.
Dolewski started her career with the City of Costa Mesa over 35 years ago as a part time staff member in Central Services. She quickly promoted into the Finance Department, working her way through multiple areas within the Department. She was a Clerk Typist, Office Specialist I, Accounting Specialist I and II, Payroll Coordinator and is currently the City’s Payroll Supervisor.
She is instrumental in the daily, monthly, quarterly and annual payroll processes for the City. In fact, in 2022, she processed over 17,300 payroll checks and 780 W2s.
