The City of Salisbury will receive an outsider’s opinion on how its employee pay/compensation structure compares to today’s market.
In second reading, the ordinance on the table was to approve funds to cover the city’s cost for a pay/compensation and classification study, which comes to about $44,000. The city has contracted with Evergreen Solutions, LLC to perform the study to determine if salaries and compensation packages are competitive in the labor market.
City employee Ann Konopik came before the council this week questioning the expenditure when the council turned down public work employees’ request for a 2-percent raise last fall.
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DelMarVa's Premier Source for News, Opinion, Analysis, and Human Interest Contact Publisher Joe Albero at alberobutzo@wmconnect.com or 410-430-5349
23 comments:
They would rather pay for another study than spread that $44000 around via merit raises.
If you are a taxpayer, the study sure makes more sense. I'm betting that some positons are already well compensated or even over compensated, while others are underpaid. A 2% across the board increase doesn't get to that.
They have done two of these since 1995, and find that all city employees are underpaid compared to the counterparts in like towns. But yet still not pay parity.
Somebody must have a relative or some other associate at Evergreen.
I suspect there are already enough studies available for less than that.
10:24 is correct. What is the point in having a study tell you to pay positions more if you already know you aren't going to comply?
anonymous 11:19, Let me throw my two cents into this.
There are some positions that are possibly being over paid and others that are severely under paid.
My personal position is as follows. I do NOT believe that ANY Department Head needs a raise. I believe the hard working employees throughout ALL departments in Salisbury deserve an increase.
Mayor Ireton wanted to RAISE TAXES to offer only his employees in the Mayor's Office to get pay increases, as if they don't get enough already.
Not only was the tax increase denied by Debbie Campbell, she also found, (I believe) $16,000,000.00 in SURPLUS.
I wonder who was trying to HIDE that money in the first place????
Nevertheless, it is time to review the salaries and it was recommended by Barrie Tilghman years ago that they be reviewed every four years. It's been longer than 4 years, this study is necessary.
"“We could give it one year and take it back the next but that is really a bad way of doing business,” Cohen said."
So does this mean that she and the council are admitting they will continue to pay for the 12 firefighters they just hired after the grant runs out in 2 years?
I agree with Joe. There are 2 positions in the Mayor's office that I am aware of and I know for a fact they are over paid. Jim Ireton had tried several times to get Lore' Chambers a $16,000 pay raise and her position isn't even needed. The position of Assistant City Administrator was created for Lore Chambers by Barrie Tilghman so she could get the minority vote.
If I was the mayor that is the first position I would eliminate.
What happened to the $16,000,000 surplus Debbie Campbell found? That could be used for pay raises. It will go a long way.
The right thing to do in the Salisbury City government is to find out what departments have employees that are not needed. This could be done by several means, but evaluate the amount of work they really do. If someone is paid to sit at a desk and they spend most of their time surfing the internet then that is a position that is not needed. We all know someone who does this.
Another waste is 3 executive positions which include the Mayor, the City Administrator and the Assistant City Administrator. We all know that the Assistant City Administrators position is a waste. Make the Mayor's position full time with an adequate and attractive salary. This can be accomplished at no cost by eliminating the Asst. City Administrator and retiring the current City Administrator. Hire someone at a much lower salary than the current Administrator and you solve that problem and you start to eliminate the corruption in the city government.
Does anyone know if Lore Chambers got that substantial raise?
12:03 you are wrong. Chambers got a 24% raise last year when her position was elevated 3 grades. Her salary is now above most department heads.
We don't need a survey worth $44,000. We just need to ask some questions...
1. Is the city able to hire people qualified to get the job done?
2. When employees leave their position, why do they do so? Where do they start working next?
If the answer to question 1 is yes, then starting salaries are fine. If the answer is no, then take a closer look to see why people decline offers.
If the answer to question 2 involves the expectation of a higher salary somewhere else, maybe they should be paid more over time. This would be especially troublesome if they were going to work in the exact same position in another municipality.
The HR department could collect this information over time without much extra effort.
If they really want to do a "survey," just have Jimbo call the other mayors/administrators and ask if their HR people would fill out a pay scale on city jobs for our HR people. If they say yes, then we'll aggregate useful numbers. Again, this is not a huge burden for the city to do on their own.
Anonymous said...
12:03 you are wrong. Chambers got a 24% raise last year when her position was elevated 3 grades. Her salary is now above most department heads.
February 15, 2013 at 1:08 PM
Actually the first figure for 2 years was appx. $16K. I am not sure what she ended up getting, but she doesn't deserve a job, she needs to be terminated.
The biggest problem with this study is our HR department is occupied by unqualified staff. The HR director Jeanne Loyd in an incompetent person who should have never been hired. The last HR director left because Jim Ireton ran her off. Get rid of most if not all department heads in this city.
Lots of misinformation here. The last study said ALL of the positions were OVERPAID compared to similar positions, except the cops and maybe some or all firefighters. Cops were WAY underpaid.
You could tell from the discussion that the council had heartburn over the vendor selected by the administration. But they don't get to make the recommendation, only thumbs up it or down it. Guess they want some third party rather than the admin doing it, but somebody mentioned an "in" with Evergreen and maybe that worried them, too.
Merit raises were suggested by previous studies but the MAYORS didn't implement them. If I'm putting two and two together and getting four, sounds like the council would like to see some changes in personnel, but that's the mayor's call - and of course he is blowing that big time, too.
Also, Campbell, Cohen and Spies did support giving employees a one-time bonus to say thanks, but Mitchell, Shields and Liarton said no. That would have been a big help to the lowly employees who do all the work, but the whiners at the top wanted their bigger share.
Watching on PAC14, I could really do some reading between the lines. Damn shame this lousy mayor puts these people in such a bad position all the time. That has to change.
Anonymous said...
12:03 you are wrong. Chambers got a 24% raise last year when her position was elevated 3 grades. Her salary is now above most department heads.
February 15, 2013 at 1:08 PM
Actually the first figure for 2 years was appx. $16K. I am not sure what she ended up getting, but she doesn't deserve a job, she needs to be terminated.
///
Actually 24% might = 16k. You two are talking past each other.
I remember one of the studies was the Hendricks study, I forget who did the other one but both cost the city about the same as this one and both found the police were below grade yet nothing was done about it. So if we have the money to pay more why are we getting a study done and if we don't have the money for raises, why are we paying 44k to find out if we should give them???
657, it will, I am confident, although there are a LOT of misinformed voters against Debbie Campbell who need to get better information sources other than the DT.
Anonymous said...
I remember one of the studies was the Hendricks study, I forget who did the other one but both cost the city about the same as this one and both found the police were below grade yet nothing was done about it. So if we have the money to pay more why are we getting a study done and if we don't have the money for raises, why are we paying 44k to find out if we should give them???
February 15, 2013 at 8:54 PM
I believe Singer was the other company. I was a Paramedic working for the City when The Hendricks Group came to town. They spent very little time with the Paramedics and said their pay was adequate and they weren't there for the paramedics. Several weeks later they went to Ocean City EMS and did a pay study for them. They were making several thousand dollars more a year then Salisbury paramedics and were told they were underpaid. Many of Salisbury's paramedics left to work in Ocean City and their starting salary was more than Salisbury's EMS supervisor's annual salary. Salisbury's EMS call volume triples that of Ocean City's. After the study the Ocean City paramedics got a substantial pay raise and they were guaranteed a 5% pay raise for the next 5 years. Some of the paramedic supervisors in Ocean City are making $120,000 a year in Salary. The street paramedics can easily make $100K a year with overtime.
Talk, talk, talk, what are you going to do when it come time to vote. Most won't even vote then sit around and complain for another 4 years. Typical Americans, just let the government continue to run incompetently and you'll get along just fine.
Singer and Hendricks both did studies for the county as well.....the county didn't follow either of them. The singer study was supposed to be a "broadband" pay grade system that no longer functions that way....at least for the people at the bottom. They took 20 different job grades and put them into 5 or 6 with the idea that some jobs would be ranked higher than others. These studies are a wast of money unless they are actually going to follow through with them.
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