Piper's Papers
Salary Adjustments and your city
By Piper - Posted: January
16, 2016 12:25 AM
The Salary Adjustment
Technique
When it
comes to salary adjustments, most city dwellers are completely in the dark as
to the time tested technique their local city officials utilize to justify an
increase of their monthly salary.
Rule number 1: It is prudent to survey other cities
(limited to prolific and high paying communities) to determine what they are
paying their high priced personnel.
Rule number 2: A claim must be made to the City Council
that, unless raises are approved in accordance to this survey, "qualified"
personnel will be difficult to obtain.
Another
technique commonly used is to create new and exotic titles for common
positions. No longer is a janitor called
a janitor - he is now a "Custodian" - and commands a better
rate of pay; accordingly a clerk in charge of handling permits is now called a Building
Permit Technician. My city does
not pay this technician by the hour - instead this city is proposing to pay
this clerk a proposed $4,333 - 5,235 per month salary range.
By creating a fancy job title, the
City is able to place higher job requirements on that position - no longer is
it enough to be a high school graduate, but applicants must have some college
and corresponding prior job experience.
In cases of higher more exotic job titles, mere advertising in trade
magazines will no longer suffice - instead, the city pays several $-thousand
for an outside advisory service to look into persons qualified for that
position before giving a list of applicants to the City.
Most
commercial type businesses offer on-the-job training and a possible route to
management by a program specifically designed to favor existing employees which
tends to create loyalty and long term job security; but my city has no such
program. Possibly, newly hired City
Managers would prefer to hire new staff members responsible to themselves
rather than promoting from within those persons hired by some other City
Manager.
Problems related to salary adjustments.
The minimum
wage is now $10 per hour - so how do we measure a monthly salary in terms of an
hourly wage for comparison?
52 weeks ×
5 days per week = 260 days ÷ 12 months = 21.67 days per month.
21.67 days
per month × 8 hrs = 173.36 hrs (on average) per month.
Now, for example, the proposed beginning salary for a Building
Permit Technician: $4,333
$4,333 ÷ 173.36 = $25.00 hour. The city can easily hire a common ordinary
"clerk" for $15.00 per hour . . . but there's more:
Average health insurance costs the
city $1,000/Mo per employee ÷ 173.36 = $5.77/hr
City Pension costs approximately
22% for non-public safety × $25./hr = $5.50/hr
The actual cost for this salaried position is $36.27 per hour. Or $6,287.77/month.
My city is recommending the Police Chief be paid $13,510 per month:
$13,510 ÷
173.36 = $77.93 per hour
5.77/hr health insurance (it's probably
higher)
23.38/hr Pension cost (30% for public safety)
$
107.08/hr or $18,563.39 per month salary.
The police chief is making nearly
as much as the City Manager - this means, of course, the City Manager will also
require a raise.
The
question here is not whether local city staff should be properly paid, but,
rather, what amount of pay is reasonable?!