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REGULAR MEETING OCTOBERT 28, 2013
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<br />and it’s an equity issue. Mr. Scott you had talked about not individuals but plans, usually what
<br />you need to do is you have to look at your whole salary structure when I go on-line and do some
<br />research a lot of the municipalities have their whole salary structure from level I all the way to
<br />the Director of the Water Works published, and you have a start rate, you have a mid-point, and
<br />you have maximum. The people who are at the maximum might already have been there 20
<br />years and that might be red line position that every year you have a market adjustment and if you
<br />are at least meeting your market you are going to go up for whatever that market adjustment is
<br />for that position. And that is what has not been happening. I know for a fact that some of our
<br />bargaining units that are 20 years veterans Mr. Mayor who are making $2,000 in supervisory
<br />positions of your person first walking in the door. That is a huge equity problem and as a
<br />taxpayer City Council, I have advised other City Council’s in the past on other issues that could
<br />cause you a legal issue at some point in the future when people catch up, because it’s only a
<br />matter of time when somebody who has been there for 20 years is going to see someone walking
<br />in the door with half their credentials getting paid the same in a regular size structure. And you
<br />need to determine what your relative market is and with a lot of these jobs you are going
<br />national, or even at least regional. So if at all any of you in your position are advertising in a
<br />professional magazine, it’s national, so what is your relative market, so it really doesn’t matter if
<br />it’s Ft. Wayne, or at cities the same size, or cities with your same dynamic as your city and you
<br />have to decide how you are going to pay people within that organization. There are ways to
<br />catch people up. When I was at Penn State at a time there were cutting funding at legislative
<br />level to the universities and each department was having to do give backs. They actually, one of
<br />the schools that they had dropped from being at the top of the pay scale they were at the bottom
<br />in their national market, they were giving incremental increases to get people up to where they
<br />needed to be, so it’s a long discussion. I would be happy to meet with any one of you. I do
<br />support what the Mayor’s trying to do; I really think you are making a lot of problems in the way
<br />that you are doing it. Because you need to say what is your job evaluation system, for instance
<br />we used to use hey I don’t know what you are doing? I did a ton of evaluations where you
<br />transferred from one job evaluation system to another job evaluation system, using benchmarks.
<br />Please City Council think about how you are doing what you are doing, I think it’s a great idea
<br />because you’ve got a lot of people that you need to bring more up to speed and it is going to
<br />affect the performance and the future of the City. Thank you.
<br />The following individual spoke in opposition.
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<br />Rev. Greg Brown, 1238 Diamond, South Bend, Indiana: I don’t agree with this. At one time we
<br />were rated as being a dying city. Now we are bringing in people with less experience and we
<br />want to give them a raise. This administration has not brought in any new jobs. We are steady
<br />taking out of the city, what are we putting back into the city? You see a lot of things going on, in
<br />the paper, round the paper and this, but we are going to pay people, we had a lady, I’m not going
<br />to call out her name worked on the job 12 years, is no longer on the job, but we will take
<br />somebody with less experience and put them on the job. Getting rid of people that has been
<br />doing a good job but they are still not on the job. But then we will go out of our community, out
<br />of our region and compare us to other cities. If we were that concerned and doing so well, we
<br />would have not been listed as a dying city. South Bend does have potential, you can compare us
<br />to Mishawaka, you don’t hear that, you hear Evansville, you see where we are currently at,
<br />we’ve been there, because we don’t have a scale, we don’t have a true scale, so we are asking
<br />you folks to do something quickly. You always want to do it fast but being fast is not about a
<br />black thing, or white, it’s a right thing. Put the people in right job at the right time for the right
<br />reasons and we can pay them equally. We can pay them what they deserve, but if we are going
<br />to take one department and merge it together to save money on one end, and then on the other
<br />end, we got these scales that go through the roof and we are going to change the city
<br />immediately, that’s not the way it is done. Thank you.
<br />In Rebuttal, Mayor Buttigieg: I will be brief, I want to thank everyone who expressed interest
<br />and concern and agreeing with the statement that our work is not done. There is certainly more
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