An awkward backtrack on city pay

The question most people are probably asking about the hefty pay increases approved for, given to, and then almost immediately rescinded from some of the Columbus Consolidated Government’s top non-elected officials would go something like this: Was there no way to see this coming?

Put another way: Were these unforeseen consequences really unforeseeable?

Maybe they were, for reasons city leaders will soon be able to explain in more detail. But for now, we’re left with a situation that turns out not to have worked out very well for … well, really anybody.

The decision to grant these raises, as detailed in a weekend report by Mike Owen, had to do with the need to replace five city department heads over the past year, with a salary of just under $88,500 set for those positions.

Except that some department heads who have been with the city for years were now about to be paid less than their new peers. Salary compression is an all-too-familiar pattern — in both public and private income structures — of longtime employees’ salary increase curves leveling off over time, until brand-new employees hired for the same or comparable positions are paid almost as much as the veterans.

But this went beyond salary compression; this was, or would have been, salary eclipse.

The result, according to Mayor Teresa Tomlinson, was a morale problem (not hard to understand) as well as the potential for a “domino effect” as other city employees pushed for substantial pay increases. (Rank and file employees received a 2 percent cost of living adjustment, which in many cases fell well short of actual “adjustments” in the cost of living.)

It’s certainly easy to argue that somebody like longtime city elections director Nancy Boren is significantly underpaid, given her time on the job and how well she does it. But when the pay hike necessary to bring her up to the $88,464 standard the city had set amounts to 22 percent, that raise becomes (fairly or not) hard to sell to others on the payroll.

The fact that these double-digit-percentage pay hikes were exclusively for people already at the high end of the city’s income hierarchy would likely seem unfair to most city workers. The fact that the raises were rescinded after one paycheck, when people receiving them were already planning their budgets based on what they reasonably thought their income would be, surely feels at least as unfair to them.

Tomlinson said the city will take this matter up again in the next budget process and try to budget raises for as many on the city payroll as available funds will allow. The issue, the mayor said, is “very broad and has many moving parts.”

She and the council are no doubt just a small sample of the people who wish that reality had been more in evidence some months ago.

This story was originally published October 3, 2016 at 6:00 PM with the headline "An awkward backtrack on city pay."