Council split on benefits of city workers’ proposed compensation plan

By JIM BROOKS
Nelson County Gazette / WBRT Radio

Consultant Paul E. Combs discusses the findings of his report on the city’s salary ranges at Tuesday night’s meeting.

Tuesday, June 2, 2015, 11:45 p.m. — Human resources consultant Paul Combs presented his study of the sdcity’s pay and classification system to the Bardstown City Council at its working session Tuesday afternoon. Months in the making, for some members of the council, the study may have created more questions than it answered.

Combs’ study compared the work that city employees perform with what other municipal employees earn at cities of similar size and classification using data from the Kentucky League of Cities.

Combs’ study revised the pay ranges the city will use in its job classification system, creating smaller ranges that are intended to give employees an opportunity to advance in their careers.

Based on his study of employee pay, 26 city employees will need to have their pay increased in order to meet the new minimum ranges of their pay scales. The move will cost the city $43,672.

Councilman Francis Lydian makes a point about the city budget at Tuesday night’s city council working session.

Combs — working with Larry Green, assistant city administrator, has also revised job descriptions for nearly every job position in city government.

The new job description will be coupled with encouragement for employees to advance their training and skills. For example, Combs said that customer service representatives will now have three ranks in which they can advance their pay while building their skills as city employees.

Councilwoman Kecia Copeland asked Combs how the plan takes care of the men and women who she said “are on the front lines” and work directly with customers — employees like the city’s garbage tippers and customer service representatives, who she noted were at the bottom of the city’s pay scales.

Councilman Roland Williams listens to discussion about the proposed 2015-16 city budget.

“They’re doing their job through rain, sleet, snow and sun, and they’re at the bottom of the list,” Copeland said. “How can they ever catch up? How will be pay them what they deserve?”

Copeland said raising the salaries of the lowest-paid workers would show the city wants to keep them. “They’re at the bottom, and they do such hard work,” she said.

Public Works Director Larry Hamilton said city workers benefits are usually superior to the private sector. City workers get raises in a couple of ways, he explained. The first is an across-the-board raise everyone receives, and then merit raises for employees who deserve it.

Councilman Bill Buckman said he believe some sort of increase tied to years of service would be helpful in bringing up the salaries for long-time workers. Buckman, a retired Bardstown Police officer, told the council of his own frustrations with the pay scales for patrol officers. With the supervisor positions filled in the police department, there was no way for officers to advance and earn more money.

Chief Rick McCubbin gestures while making a point during a discussion Tuesday by the Bardstown City Council.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa”You can never fully advance in your pay grade with a 2 percent increase,” he told the council. Buckman suggested setting up pay tiers based on years of service.

Combs said he would not recommend such a system because in his experience, the economy is a variable that will eventually impact such planned salary increases and make them impossible to sustain in lean, financial times. Green added that some cities that adopted such stepped salary increases have found themselves unable to follow through due to budgetary constraints.

Councilman Francis Lydian said he felt the city’s proposed budget should not include $400,000 in revenue that is anticipated from an occupational tax increase later this year.

“It’s misleading to leave it in and assume you’re voting for something and assuming you’re going to have the revenue and it has not been approved,” Lydian said.

Lydian complained that the council had not completely reviewed the budget, particularly with the late addition of funding to pay for a fulltime fire department.

“If I knew we were going to have this extraordinary expense in the fire department when we had the first budget meeting, I think we would have had some department heads make some cuts,’ he said.

“It’s inappropriate bookkeeping to me, to have revenue in there that the council might not even vote for,” he said.

MAYOR, COUNCIL SALARIES. One of the areas Combs studied was the pay for the city’s mayor and council. Combs distributed data that compared the pay for mayor and council members of similar cities, but said the data wasn’t representative of Bardstown because those cities don’t have a budget the size of Bardstown’s budget.

Combs said he would gather data on mayor and council salaries based on budgets rather than population size.

Green noted that Georgetown has a population of about 30,000 people but a city budget of only $30 million compared to Bardstown’s 13,000 population and $48 million budget.

In other discussion, the council:

— discussed the proposed 2015-16 budget reduction for the city’s contribution to the Bardstown Industrial Development Corp.

NEXT UP. The council will consider first reading of the 2015-16 budget at next Tuesday’s regular city council meeting. The city’s finance committee will meet at 4 p.m. Thursday in the mayor’s conference room in City Hall.

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