County finalizes pay plan
By Steve Herring
Published in News on May 20, 2015 1:46 PM
Three of seven Wayne County commissioners expressed reservations about switching to a merit-based pay plan based on employee evaluations out of concern that it could become a "buddy and friend" system.
However, Commissioners John Bell, Ed Cromartie and Joe Daughtery said Tuesday they were satisfied with assurances from County Manager George Wood that sufficient safeguards were in place to keep that from happening.
Commissioners also appeared to like a provision in the plan that no changes can be made to it without an amendment being approved by them.
"This assures that you have complete control over any adjustments to the plan," Wood said.
Even Cromartie, who two weeks ago voted against the first part of the plan, voted yes Tuesday to adopt the pay scale associated with the position classification and pay plan.
Commissioner Ray Mayo's motion to adopt the scale was unanimously approved.
Cromartie said he approved of the "mechanics" of the plan, but that he still favored across-the-board pay increases.
"I guess I had better repeat what I said before," Bell said. "I am going to support this, Mr. Wood, but as you know I did not like what we used to call in state government the 'B and L' -- the buddies and friends type situations when it comes to merit pay raises.
"I just don't want to see this turn into one of those, and you have assured me that it wouldn't. So I am going to vote for it."
Daughtery said, he, too, had expressed his concerns on "some type of special arrangements being made between a department head and an employee under him."
"You agreed and have assured us you will monitor this very carefully to make sure merit raises are given out to those who merit them," he said.
Mayo said that in 38 years in his own company of dealing with the merit system that he has found the exact opposite to be true.
"Any system that you put in, whether it be an evaluation system or any kind, pay system, or whatever -- it is only going to be as good as the supervisors and department heads as far as their evaluation skills," he said. "That is where the whole key to the merit system being effective is going to lie.
"This is not going to happen in six months. It is going to take a while to get all of this implemented and get all of the criteria down that is necessary to put every employee, 100 percent employees, on the same level to get an evaluation and have an opportunity to earn a raise or not earn a raise."
The board on May 5 by a 6-1 vote did away with the old system of across-the-board raises.
That part of the plan replaced the previous 19-step per grade plan with three steps -- beginning, middle and ending.
Daughtery asked if adjustments to add a position to the scale could be done at a later time. Wood said it could done by a board-approved resolution.
"I think a number of us have had some concerns in regards to certain people that are deputies that may in fact are not being paid commensurate with that risk versus a library assistant, or whatever," Daughtery said. "So you are going to review that after the budget time?"
Wood said that he would.
"At some point we will be going through these," Wood said. "Now I was going to look really for those primarily that we think are underpaid. That is part of the budget.
"If you remember what we talked about on the pay plan is that we would have a pool for merit increases. Then we would have a pool where if we identified jobs that were underpaid that that pool would be use to bring those up."
But that will be at a later date, he said.
"We will be studying that throughout the year," Wood said.
Wood has used the following example of 1.5 percent pool for merit increases in which each department head would get that amount of money to cover 1.5 percent of wages and benefits for his or her department.
The exception would be for the department heads' wages, which would go into a pool for the county manager and assistant county manager to determine.
Each year a rule would be determined for the maximum percentage raise any one employee could receive, he said.
In the example above, if the pool is 1.5 percent, the maximum any one employee could receive might be set at 1.75 percent.
However, the department head must stay within the 1.5 percent pool of money for raises, Wood said.
The total amount of money needed to provide the raises will be included in each year's county budget proposal. Wood said he is in the process of completing his budget proposal that he will present to commissioners on Thursday, May 28.
It has been four years since county employees have had a pay increase because of the struggling economy and a pay plan that was set up to provide increases of 2.5 percent across-the-board, Wood said.
The newly adopted plan is more flexible because the increases are tied to performance and not to a specific amount, he said.
The pay scale includes all county employees with the exception of elected officials including the sheriff and register of deeds.
Nor does it cover contracted positions including the county manager, assistant county manager and county attorney, who are appointed by the board; and the Wayne County Development Alliance president, who is appointed by the Alliance board with concurrence of the county manager.
Commissioners set those salaries.