50 cents per hour added to COLA hike
On the heels of a 3.6 percent cost-of-living adjustment - their first in three years - employees with the City of Scott City gained an unexpected bonus.
The Scott City Council has also given all non-supervisory personnel a 50 cent across-the-board pay increase effective immediately.
The additional pay boost is designed to bring local salaries in line with the median for other cities of similar size in the state. It followed a meeting between Mayor Dan Goodman and the city’s department heads.
While all non-supervisory employees will benefit from the raise, the council is specifically hoping to bring police officers, dispatchers and public works personnel more in line with similar job positions across the state. According to salary surveys, the average pay of Scott City police officers is about $2.10 below the state median while public works employees “are a little more than that,” according to Goodman.
The average hourly pay for a public works employee in Scott City is $12.14, compared to the median for similar sized towns of $14.39; average pay for dispatchers is $12.49, with a median of $14.58; and police officers average $14.11, compared to the median of $16.14.
Councilman Fred Kuntzsch noted that salaries for most city employees are 10-12 percent behind the median. It’s even more difficult for employees to catch up with their counterparts in other cities when the starting salary is 80 percent of the median.
City Clerk Brenda Davis said the policy changes as council members come and go, but there was a time when employees would get 25- to 50-cent per hour pay increases after they were on the job for six months.
“But that has stopped,” she said. “The employees would also get raises for additional training, but previous councils felt that was part of their job so it also ended.”
“This still doesn’t bring us up to the median, but it’s what we can afford to do,” says the mayor.
Merit Pay Unchanged
The council considered changes to the merit pay formula, but decided to continue with the existing pay scale for the remainder of this year. Merit pay is added to the employee’s salary based on evaluations by department heads.
Employees get no merit pay for an evaluation in which they “meet expectations.” They can get a two percent increase if they “exceed” expectations and three percent for an “outstanding” evaluation. In the last round of evaluations, 59 percent of the employees were rated as “outstanding.”
The council debated whether to increase the “outstanding” evaluation to five percent while leaving the other two categories unchanged. Councilman Fred Kuntzsch said the salary structure needs “more flexibility” and suggested putting more control into the hands of department heads. Councilman Gary Eitel suggested a merit pay range of 3-5 percent for employees who earn an “outstanding” evaluation.
That also brought calls for tougher evaluations.
“If we do a better job with our evaluations, then maybe 60 percent of our employees won’t be outstanding,” said Councilman Everett Green.