Over the last week or so there has been a great deal of rumors,
confusion and misunderstandings about what the City Council’s
actions were concerning the city’s
”
exempt
”
group. Hopefully, this letter will explain it so that residents
will better understand what it was and, more importantly, what it
was not.
Over the last week or so there has been a great deal of rumors, confusion and misunderstandings about what the City Council’s actions were concerning the city’s “exempt” group. Hopefully, this letter will explain it so that residents will better understand what it was and, more importantly, what it was not.
Let’s start with what it isn’t. There were no across the board raises of 10 percent or 15 percent for the
42-person “exempt” group made up of department heads, division heads and technical/professional positions. What did occur was a compensation/market study of each of the 36 job classifications in the group.
Compensation/market studies are done periodically for the positions in each of the city’s bargaining groups to ensure that our salary and benefits are competitive with a Council approved group of comparison cities (cities of like size, number of employees, demographics, in the same geographic area, housing costs, etc.).
These periodic studies are extremely important to this city, not just in our ability to recruit highly qualified employees, but most importantly to retain the excellent workforce we currently have. The “guideline” (not policy) used in these studies was to be 10 percent higher than the average of the comparison cities, not 10 percent higher than the highest city.
The fire and police unions had compensation/market studies done during their most recent negotiations, and the “miscellaneous unit” had an extensive study done in 2001 which led to several market adjustments in 2002 and 2003. The last exempt group compensation/market study was done in the spring of 2000.
The end result of this study was that 15 classifications out of the 36 were found to be below the 10 percent average. They ranged from 1.5 percent to 13.9 percent. Out of these, 15 positions seven were vacant, needed more study, or were held by brand new employees which meant that no immediate pay increases were necessary. Therefore, there were eight positions, or 10 employees who received the corresponding increase to bring them to the 10 percent average.
The second major part of the study was to look for supervisor/employee “compression or compaction” problems. The definition of compression or compaction is the difference between a supervisor’s pay and the pay of the employee that he/she is supervising. If it is too close, compression occurs. Based on a study done for the Council, the normal range between supervisor and employee should be 10 to 15 percent with the maximums around 20 percent. The Council’s guideline was 15 percent for one basic reason – overtime.
For example, in the police department, the compensation study showed that the captains (in the exempt group) were only earning 4.7 percent more than the sergeants (in the police bargaining unit) in cash compensation. Since captains do not earn overtime and the average sergeant earns about 15 percent additional in overtime, one can quickly see where the 15 percent came from.
The third issue that the compensation plan addressed was internal equity. This means that jobs of similar responsibilities, that require personnel of similar skills, knowledges and abilities should be in the same pay grade. The internal equity review affected only a handful of employees. In these cases pay plan adjustments were made, but no immediate pay increases were involved. All increases because of this change will be based on the employees’ performance/merit as part of each person’s individual annual performance evaluation.
So what is the bottom line? By fitting the three parts of the puzzle together, the result is that 20 out of the 42 exempt employees will get an immediate pay adjustment for market, compression or internal equity reasons. Another nine employees are affected, but only through future merit pay increases. Finally 13 employees of the group are not affected at all.
The last area I wish to address is why is this happening now, especially in light of the budget discussions? First, this process with the exempt group has been going on since late 2005, and they are the last in all the bargaining units to go through the negotiations process. It would be unfair to this group to have them wait since every other bargaining unit settled on their contracts over the last two years. In fact, the city is currently in negotiations again with the miscellaneous unit (contract terminates 6/30) and will be starting with the fire union this fall (contract terminates 12/31) for their next contracts. So when would we delay it to?
Also, because this was a compensation/market study, waiting only will make the situations described above worse. For example, if the exempt group is delayed, the police sergeants, per their contract, will get a 3 percent increase on July 1. That will leave the police captains only 1.7 percent higher than the sergeants.
I hope this has been of some help in understanding this issue. If I could leave you with one overall thought, and that is the city is not treating this group any differently than the other three bargaining groups within our organization. And that is the way it should be.
Guest columnist Jay Baksa is the city administrator for Gilroy. Anyone interested in writing a guest column may contact Editor Mark Derry at
ed****@ga****.com
