10-28-13 Common Council Meeting Minutes

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REGULAR MEETING OCTOBERT 28, 2013 In my businesses, people are the most important asset, and I have succeeded by investing in the best people. I hope the City Council sees the wisdom in also investing in their important people assets. Thank You, Andrew T. Berlin Chairman & CEO, Berlin Packaging Chairman & CEO, South Bend Silver Hawks Chairman & CEO, Berlin Aviation Limited Partner, Chicago White Sox Commissioner, Glencoe Public Safety Commission Doug Anderson, 1733 Stockard Place, South Bend, Indiana; District 1, I wanted to come up and give my support of the salary and compensation that the City Administration is submitting. As was previously mentioned there was in the archives of the South Bend Tribune you can find a story about Mr. Berlin and how he has built successfully organizations and it truly does start with valuing your people. I do believe that this information is going to be very valuable in helping the City of South Bend to continue to attract and motivate to be the best level city that it needs to be. I know that the Council is interested in in a lot of data, and it is very easy to ask for data and become wary and disillusioned and lost in the data, but these you are our elected officials and we have to take your recommendations on merit and move this forward. Getting the best people is very important. Thank you very much for your time. Robert Ducoffe, 14281 Partridge Dr. Granger, Indiana, Dean, of the Business School at Indiana University at South Bend, the main point that I would like to make is that we have an ideal system for compensation but simply because we know how important it is to pay competitive salaries. In the business school at IU South Bend we hire specialized professors our salaries are publicly available, candidates interviewing for jobs can easily compare and our experience has shown us that if we don’t pay reasonably competitive salary we simply can’t hire more qualified professor and without this we can’t offer the high quality programs that our students and community expects us to offer. In the area where I work there has been a tremendous growth and demand in business of higher education and there is a shortage of professors and the salaries have gone up as a result tremendously. So for example when we hire a new professor who maybe in his or her late 20’s it’s quite common for an individual like that, that we hire to be paid more than a professor that has been serving IU South Bend for 15 or 20 years. At a previous university that I worked at I worked for a very, very well-known professor who used to joke if he had to he would prefer to die than come back as a junior professor. Of course nobody likes this, but we do it because it is necessary, we pay competitively in the short-term to hire talented people and we hope in the longer term that we will be able to grow and prove our knowledge because if we do that, then the chances are greater and all of us will benefit in the longer term. Of course there is no guarantee that, that occurs what we do is we use a small portion of the raise pool each year to redistribute based on equity so that the high performers get additional just compensation over the years to adjust the inequities. I appreciate the opportunity to address the Council. Thank You. Valerie Kraus 4207 Norton Drive, South Bend, Indiana, prior to that I was up in Harris Twp. For about 12 years. By profession I am a compensation analysts and performance technologist and organizational development specialist. As my colleague from IUSB brought up but one thing at a university is that a university position is an independent market in itself. So let say you are going to go court, when you toss it out in the market place it is based pretty much on that individual. The jobs that we are talking about now I do support paying more for certain jobs but City Council, I have been following you guys for quite a while in terms of your pay structures and you have a totally collapsed pay structure across the board. In addition to having a (inaudible) in the market place. It is not as easy as the fix we are talking about right now. You don’t want to explicitly look at individuals, and when you come to time in position, one of the things that is important is if your salary structure has not kept close with the market it’s going to look like you pegging it to John Smith who has been in the market in that position for 20 years 21