County commission looking to perform internal salary study

The Cole County Commission would prefer to do an in-house salary study on the pay of county employees.

At Tuesday’s commission meeting, Eastern District Commissioner Jeff Hoelscher said, “There’s no way to make everybody happy, and I’d rather not spend the money for an outside consultant to do it.”

Finance Officer Debbie Malzner said Jefferson City still is in the process of interviewing consultants to do the city’s study, which they believe could cost between $38,000 to more than $70,000. She said it was probably going to take them six months to a year to complete the process.

“We can do it ourselves,” Hoelscher said. “We know more about classifications and qualifications for positions than an outside company would.”

Hoelscher also said they need to continue the merit pool plan they have been implementing over the last few years.

In October 2011, the commission approved a plan to allow elected officeholders to abandon guidelines in a 2005 salary study used to determine employee compensation.

The merit pool plan calls for the commission to allocate a sum of money to officeholders for salaries. Once departments receive those allocations, the officeholder determines how the money is paid to the department employees. Commissioners have called these merit raises.

Sheriff Greg White, who proposed a plan rejected by the commission for pay increases in his department, said he agreed the merit pool has been good, but they also need to look at experience and education levels and what that means for the pay level of positions.

“Looking at retention is more my concern,” said White, who last year lost 11 part-time and six full-time employees due to salary issues. “We’re run pretty thin when you compare our department to others of similar size.”

Western District Commissioner Kris Scheperle said he also wants to do an in-house study and believes education would be a key factor.

“We just can’t pull numbers out of a hat,” he said.

Presiding Commissioner Sam Bushman said he would try to contact other counties in the process of doing their own studies, such as Cape Girardeau and Franklin counties, since it looks like it will take longer for Jefferson City and the state of Missouri to complete their studies.

“We’re not the only ones trying to address this,” he said.

The last pay study the county did was known as the Archer Study, which was approved in 2005 with the idea of increasing and equalizing salaries for non-elected county employees.

“It worked for the first year, but we found we didn’t have the money to keep up with it,” Malzner said.

Officials at the time said the flaw in the Archer Study was it assumed the county would be able to increase and adjust the schedule each year. It didn’t take into account if there was a bad financial year; there was no way to fix it.

Scheperle said the merit pool has been good, but added, “We have to give a cost-of-living increase just to try to keep up with other communities. When we have a study, we need to make sure we focus on the base salary and then be able to move each year to keep it going.”

County Auditor Kristen Berhorst also talked about a three-phase salary study Boone County is doing. She said they had an outside company come in and do a study earlier, but found it didn’t work for them so now they are doing their own, starting with looking at salaries, job classifications, as well as the entities who would be their competition to keep or get employees.

Commissioners asked Berhorst to get in touch with the Boone County officials who have been working on their plan to come and give them a briefing on what they’ve done.

“Doing it in-house gives us more control,” Hoelscher added. “I want to keep good people as often as we can, but there are going to be times we just can’t.”