10-28-13 Common Council Meeting Minutes

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REGULAR MEETING OCTOBERT 28, 2013 added level of capacity in our HR Department can continue undertaking analysis of wages and salaries to try to keep pace. And so while in the spirit of truth and advertising I can’t promise that tonight’s salary ordinance will leave us with a perfectly equitable outcome that is in line with where we think an ideal city would be. We do think that it will leave us a lot better than where we were last year and we feel some urgency about correcting this. I just want to note we took action largely because members of the Council last year when we were making the case for a handful of salary changes ask me I think the very legitimate question why are you only waiting until a position is vacant before you do something about the salary to that position. We heard that message and part of our response is what we are doing here. As you’ll see again across the direct reports to the Mayor so that the most Senior members of the City of South Bend Government, a number of people get no raise at all, but there are raises for a number of employees who we have found continue to lag behind their counterparts in other Indiana cities. The idea here is also to try to have a more equitable range of pay among those who are directly reporting to the Mayor. Under the current salary structure there is a nearly fifty or over forty thousand dollar variation between the best paid and the least paid director reporting to the Mayor. This is plus or minus ten thousand dollar difference. There are also not only directed at the director level that reports to the Mayor, but also aims to adjust salaries that are in some cases one level in, so at the sub department head level and there are a number of leadership positions especially in the Public Works field that we feel needs work. One thing that this salary ordinance does is creates a salary for a Deputy Director of Public Works a position we felt such a need for some time to bring us into the norm of having a number two or an executive officer for a department that has more than one hundred employees and a very large budget. As well as making sure that positions including the Water Works which is currently vacant and has been vacant for too long in paying competitively. I won’t take you through all of the comparisons that went into all of this although they have been submitted to the Council in raw data form. I do want to take this opportunity to illustrate what we are trying to do. And to take just one example, Chief of Staff in the Office of the Mayor, next year the year we are budgeting for is of course the third year that the Chief of Staff Position would be in existence and while the Mayor’s Office has shrunk considerably in personnel from where it was and in dollars from where it was even a few years ago. The responsibilities of a position like this have only increased. As you can see (on the Power Point presentation) on the bottom left we are currently at the back of the pack among comparable cities that we have found in Indiana with comparable positions. So if you look over here which is Ft. Wayne which is the best paying I believe around $122,000.00 over here on the far left you have side you have is our level of pay. What we are proposing is that we move from the back of the pack to the middle of the pack. So this is where the 2014 Ordinance would put us, basically in the middle, slightly below I would admit slightly below the Indiana average of the cities we evaluated, but certainly more competitive and more in line with what you see around the state. One question that was raised was whether this comparison might be misleading if we did not take into account of cost of living. So we did a little bit of research such as we could being here earlier today to get a better sense and what we have found is that the cost of living score in Ft. Wayne is 91.3 where in South Bend it is 90.1, so that could account for one or 2% of the difference but certainly not for the 80% difference that you would see here in the sense that you would have to raise today’s South Bend Chief of Staff level by about 80% in order for it to be the same as the counter-parts pay in Ft. Wayne. Evansville has an even higher possibility, and then again you could argue in this case 3% or 4% could be accounted for that, but that’s about it. Indianapolis 92.6 relative to our score of 90.1. Here again I just want to give you a sense of comparison right now we are close to the bottom of the pack in terms of the maximum allowable salary for the Park’s Director; it is higher than Evansville, but considerably lower than the Indiana average. We are trying to move it to the middle of the pack there, both out of fairness and to make sure that we retain and attract good folks for the job. Water Works I just want to linger on for a moment because hopefully I don’t need to press upon you how important the job or the person who is responsible for making sure that 100,000 people have clean safe drinking water is. It is a source of concern that this position has been advertised for some time and has not attracted candidates of the level of qualification that would be expected. We believe compensation has something to do with that and we believe moving to the middle of the pack will be an appropriate response that would make us more competitive. Chairperson White: You have the opportunity to ask questions. Mayor Buttigieg: Forgive me, I just wanted to take this opportunity to ask that if there are any further concerns or questions much like what we talked about earlier and would want that raised as soon as possible so we would be ready. 15