Salary Justice

Another important issue I've been working on is raises for M&C (Management and Confidential) employees. These are all the County non-union employees, usually in management positions or other positions of responsibility. Their salaries are set by full Board resolution every January and they've had one raise in nine years. The average Otsego County Department Head makes an average of $12,000 less than their colleagues in other upstate NY counties. At least a dozen M&C managers make less than people they manage.

When an M&C employee, and especially a Department Head, resigns or retires, we cannot, as you can imagine, find anyone to come to Otsego County at the same salary (and no one currently working in their department wants a promotion to a low-paying job with no history of raises). So we have been advertising these positions at much higher rates, with predictable and understandable protests regarding the injustice of continuing to pay remaining employees at such a low rate. As a result of this process, for instance, the Deputy Director of the Office for the Aging, a new (and, I think, very high-quality) hire, now makes more than the Commissioner of the Department of Social Services.

Last year, the Performance Review and Goal Setting Committee, along with Treasurer Dan Crowell and Personnel Director Penney Gentile, created a reasonable raise schedule for one year, providing everyone with a 3% raise, and $200/yr increase for every year of service up to five years. This was a stopgap measure, because – and this is the essential piece – we need a perpetual salary scale which determines raises – with a merit component – as automatically as possible, each year.

But even this stopgap measure was defeated, allegedly in favor of a salary study, which was proposed last fall and has just gone out for bid, for the second time. It will not be ready for the next salary resolution, at the January, 2018 full Board meeting.

Len Carson, a Rep from Oneonta, has been working with Dan and Penney this year to create another stopgap raise proposal, and it looks about the same as last years (which, to be fair, was hashed out and edited and debated and was about as good as something like that is going to get). It will cost less than $150,000, which is about one third the cost of one of the plow trucks we bought last year.

What needs to happen is that the current one-year raise needs to go into effect in January, and then the salary study needs to be carefully integrated into the personnel and budget process during 2018. Our employees – almost universally of high quality – must be compensated fairly. We cannot continue to kick this can down the road.