From behind the Sentinel paywall: Christmas bonuses and raises may be in the future for city of Douglasville employees if council members decide to act on a staff recommendation presented to them last week. A recent pay study by Evergreen Solutions shows that city employees are paid less than those in other municipalities. Staff along with members of the finance and personnel and organization committees had been working to come up with a recommendation on how to proceed with implementation of the pay study. City Manager Bill Osborne previously stated that a good target date for implementation would be Jan. 1. The recommendations presented during Wednesdays committee meetings by Assistant City Manager Marcia Hampton include converting 18 hourly employees to salary, which will cost $40,965. An average of the last five years of overtime was used to determine salaries and it was compared to the new minimum to ensure it was in line with the new proposed pay plan. The cost wont be an additional reoccurring annual expense because the funds would typically be built into the overtime budget. That would move from having only eight salaried employees to 26 employees, Hampton said. Police captains are among the employees expected to go from hourly employees to salaried. The second recommendation is to make an adjustment to 79 employees salaries, bringing them up to the newly proposed minimum on the pay scale, which would cost $238,956.77. That figure represents the additional annual reoccurring cost. If implementation starts Jan. 1, the cost for the remainder of the fiscal year will be $147,735. The third recommendation includes a $300 Christmas bonus for full-time employees this year, which would cost $79,875. Were asking that the council move forward with providing that at the last pay period of December, Hampton said. The final recommendation is considering merit and cost-of-living increases as part of the FY 2015-2016 budget process. I do believe that part of the reason we have compression issues, part of the reason why we have a lag in salaries is because we have not been implementing merit and cost of living increases, Hampton said. I feel like if we can start to begin to make this part of the budget process, this would be a better practice than what weve been doing in the past. The total cost to implement all of the recommendations during the current years budget is $268,575. Finance Director Karin Callan has proposed two sources of funding to cover the costs. A total of $143,000 is expected to come from savings on health insurance and $125,575 will be covered by a projected increase in sales taxes. This would just be step one, Hampton said. We have a ways to go through the process, but this would at least get some of the critical issues that you have addressed completed. Then we can do the budget process and start working on some of the others as we can afford them.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Dec 2014 00:26:15 +0000
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