City employees could receive pay raises under proposed plan

The drop in the unemployment rate over the past few years is making it more difficult for the Columbus Consolidated Government to compete for good employees.

City Human Resources Director Reather Hollowell presented a pay reform plan to Columbus Council Tuesday to address the problem.

Under the plan, all current full-time employees with a minimum of three years of service would receive modest pay increases starting on July 1. The pay raises would amount to $500 for three years of service, $750 for five years of service and $1,000 for seven years of service and beyond, up to 30 years.

Employees celebrating anniversaries would receive an additional monetary boost for their years of service.

Those in the Columbus Police Department and Muscogee County Sheriff’s Office, which have already implemented phases of pay reform, would receive the increases in addition to other salary enhancements.

“This will help encourage long-term employees to continue to serve,” Hollowell said during her PowerPoint presentation. “A lot of the long-term employees are still at the minimum or the entry-level pay of their pay-grade, yet they’ve been here for many years. So this gets at that and allows for some separation for somebody who’s been here for 10 years. They’ve done an excellent job, but there is very little room for promotion within the particular area that they’re in. ... It’s a reward for the experience that they have.”

Mayor Teresa Tomlinson, who plans to include some form of pay reform in her proposed fiscal year 2019 budget, said the city has grappled with salary compression across all departments due to a sluggish economy in recent years. She said the city has given bonuses on occasion, but nothing consistent, and she believes a systematic annual increase is needed.

“I believe that we ought to give our employees real pay enhancements, and it has to be in their base salary,” the mayor said. “ .... So instead of the erratic bonuses from year to year, I think it’s better for the city from a planning standpoint, for our fiscal prudence, and certainly for the benefit of the employees, to have base pay adjustments regularly.”

Tomlinson said the unemployment rate, now at 5.1 percent, has dropped precipitously in recent years, and she expects the city to lose more professionals to jobs in the private sector if salaries don’t increase.

A pay plan developed by the University of Georgia proposed that the city provide employees a 2.5 percent pay increase on a yearly basis. The mayor said that would cost millions of dollars and it is not a sustainable plan.

“What this is is an opportunity to set forth incremental standards that every year are automatically employed,” she said of the new pay reform proposal. “Now, that does not mean council can’t provide increased and more generous pay enhancements. That can always be done. But this will happen regardless of those extra cost-of-living, those extra bonuses, or extra pay increases that council may want to give.

“It provides certainty for the employees so they know, if nothing else happens, even if the economy is not good, even if the sales tax doesn’t come in, they know they’re going to get this in three years, in five years, in seven years, 10 years, 15 and so forth.”

Hollowell said the city has 3,000 employees, about 2,400 of whom are full-time. There are currently 1,810 full-time employees who meet the three-years of service threshold, and 426 that will celebrate three to 30 year anniversaries in 2019.

It would cost the city $2.1 million to implement the plan the first year, Hollowell said.

The cost will drop to $510,213 in 2020 and to $429,838 in 2021.

Councilor Gary Allen said city officials were making it seem like councilors have done nothing to address the problem over the years. But they’ve done everything that they could to try to increase wages; the money just wasn’t there, he said.

“I just want to make it clear that we’ve done all we could do every year to address compression, to address pay, and sometimes we did that through bonuses because we wanted to give them something,” he said.

Councilor Judy Thomas said she had a lot of questions about how Pay Reform would be implemented.

“I want to make it real clear to you and everybody that’s listening that I want to give our employees as much money as quick as we can,” she said. “But I want to make sure that we’re doing it in such a way that it’s sustainable, that we can continue to do it and that it is equitable across all lines.”

This story was originally published January 30, 2018 at 5:46 PM with the headline "City employees could receive pay raises under proposed plan."