Councilmen concerned mayor granted raises without council approval

By JIM BROOKS
Nelson County Gazette / WBRT Radio

Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2014, 7:30 p.m. — Pay raises for some city employees have several members of the Bardstown City Council asking why they were not informed about the raises or the impact they might have on the city’s 2014-15 budget.

Mayor Bill Sheckles (file photo).

In the week of Oct. 13th, members of the council learned that some employees of the city’s electric department received additional pay raises above the 2 percent across-the-board raises the council approved in the 2014-15 budget.

According to Councilman Tommy Reed, employees in the city’s electrical department received pay raises as had been discussed during a September Finance Committee meeting. At that meeting, the city’s department heads made it known that many city employees were underpaid — some significantly so — when compared to their counterparts in other public and private sector jobs.

In an Oct. 15 email to the rest of the council, Reed asked which council members would like to add their names to an email to Mayor Bill Sheckles to request “a clarification of all departments that were increased, to bring some transparency to the subject and how they deviated from (the) budget increase that was approved.”

In that email to Sheckles, Reed expressed his frustration over the lack of communication between the mayor and the council.

“Here we go again! After weeks of the mayor telling the public there is no communication problems between he and the council ….. the Council learns by rumors and employee complaints that employees in electric and cable have received the raises they lobbied for in this summer’s Finance Committee meeting. We all can speculate how this happened, but it was be nice if the council could hear it from the mayor on the how & why.”

“The phrase ‘What we’ve got here is failure to communicate’ is a quotation from the 1967 film “Cool Hand Luke,” but certainly applies to the last three and a half years of this administration,” Reed concluded in his email.

Councilman Tommy Reed (file photo).

Reed rejected the premise that the city employee compensation budget can be side-stepped, and asks why the city bothered to hire a consultant to look at the city’s salary structure when “decisions about the plan have already been made by the Mayor and Larry (Green).”

The council recently approved hiring consultant Paul E. Combs to review the compensation plan and recommend updates after department heads told the council in September of pay inequities among some city job classifications.

In his reply to Reed’s email, Sheckles said the pay raises in the electric and cable department would not adversely impact the city budget.

Currently, city employees are placed job classifications, and each classification has a pay range.

“I assure you none of these pay adjustments were out of the range of our current Classification and Compensation Plan,” Sheckles wrote.

In an interview Tuesday night, Sheckles said it isn’t unusual for city employees to receive raises without consulting with the council and don’t need council approval. Employees who take on added responsibilities, earn advanced certifications or build their skills set that makes them more valuable as city employees and they rightfully deserve better pay, Sheckles said. Because the council is not involved in the day-to-day operation of City Hall, they aren’t aware of pay raise requests.

“The department heads can make requests any time of the year,” he said of the raises. “It really doesn’t affect the budget to any great extent.”

Sheckles said city has to be competitive with its pay to keep its experienced, highly skilled employees. He cited employees in the electric and cable department who recognized they could make significantly higher pay working for another utility or private company.

“As mayor, I have to ask myself, ‘Do I lose two or three of my top electrical people because are wages aren’t competitive?’ Or do I let them go and then try to hire somebody else without their skills and experience? That’s the decision I have to make from where I sit,” he said.

In a text message, Councilman John Royalty expressed his frustration at being kept in the dark about the raises, and suggested that it might be appropriate to ask the Kentucky Attorney General to determine if the raises were appropriate.

Sheckles attributed some of the uproar about the raises to the fact an election is just around the corner.

“In this political season, it’s a shame for some of us to make mountains out of mole hills,” Sheckles wrote in his email to Reed. “If any Councilman has questions about anything at City Hall, all they have to do is ask, my door, phone, and emails are always available.”

Sheckles and Royalty will be interviewed Thursday, Oct. 30, on the “Bradford & Brooks” show, 11-noon on WBRT Radio.

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