All Mike Magner wants for Christmas is a fully staffed Brown County Highway Department.
Well, maybe it’s not the only thing, but it’s definitely at the top of his wish list.
Magner, the superintendent, is dealing with staff vacancies at a very inopportune time. He’s short five truck drivers, about a quarter of his staff.
The highway department has 12 major snow routes and only 10 drivers now to do them, which means Magner and his assistant superintendent are also out driving trucks if the need exists.
Depending on how much snow and ice is on the ground, it can take a plow truck driver eight to 12 hours to do a route, Magner said.
“They’re each covering between 12 and 15 miles, but a load of material doesn’t go very far, so it’s that back and forth. You go spread a mile, then you have to go back to the garage to reload, then go spread again,” he said.
“If we actually were fully staffed and had 15 drivers for a route that is at the extreme corner, like the upper end of Sweetwater, we could put two guys on that route” to get it done faster, he said.
On Dec. 16, the Brown County Council unanimously voted to give a $1.50-per-hour raise to the current drivers with commercial driving licenses as a way to keep them from leaving too, and hopefully encourage more people to apply for the five open driver jobs.
The department also a mechanic assistant job open, too.
Magner initially approached the county council in November about giving his crew raises to help retain and hire qualified CDL drivers.
All employees with a CDL will receive the $1.50 raise next year, including new employees.
The highway department requires drivers to already have their CDLs when they are hired, and prefers drivers who have had experience driving an actual truck. Those employees would start at $17.50 per hour with the raise. New employees without experience driving would start at $16.42 per hour with the ability to move up the pay scale as they gain experience.
“When you stick somebody in a $200,000 truck, we prefer to have experience and don’t run off into a ditch or two,” Magner said.
Equipment operators will now earn $18.58 per hour with the raise factored in. All county highway employees also receive benefits like insurance, PERF and vacation time.
At the December council meeting, Magner presented a comparison of pay for highway department drivers in six surrounding counties as well as the pay rate for beginning drivers with the Indiana Department of Transportation. He discovered a range between $15.31 and $19.26 per hour.
“We only have two driver (pay) scales and those two scales now are $14.77 and $15.84, which means we’re underpaid at either 54 cents an hour on the low end or $3.42 on the high end per hour,” he said at the Dec. 16 meeting.
“In Bartholomew County, as long as you have a CDL, they were starting at $19 an hour for anybody that had a CDL. That’s what we’re competing against.”
After looking at what other counties paid, Magner suggested giving his crew a $1.50 raise. The money will come from his department’s budget, which is not funded by local property taxes. Due to vacancies in his department, Magner has about $137,000 rolling into his budget for 2020 that would cover the raises.
If all of his open driver positions were filled and those workers received the $1.50 an hour raise, Magner estimated it would cost his department $56,000 a year. But with only 12 drivers on staff, the price tag for the raises is about $37,000, he said — “basically the equivalent to one person’s salary,” he said.
Council President Dave Redding suggested splitting the pay raise into quarterly stipends as an incentive to get drivers to stay with the department all year.
Council member Art Knight said he would rather the drivers receive their raise now in their wages. “They don’t care about anything but what they get in that check at end of week.”
The raise will apply to base pay and not to overtime hours. Magner said he has a separate line item in his budget to cover overtime.
“You should be able to hire a lot better that way,” council Vice President Dave Critser said.
“This is not something new. We had to do the same thing for the jail back about four or five years ago. We went in and reclassified the jailers, which raised their pay. It’s essentially the same thing that we’re doing. This is not something new, this is not setting a precedent. It’s already been done.”
Magner said the main reason he has difficulty finding drivers is due to competition from other employers who are paying more. He said he has lost employees to trucking companies, and another took a job at a factory where he could make more money.
“It’s been getting worse over the last three years with … all of the highway construction, because there’s a lot of these contracted trucking companies that are doing highway work, interstate work,” he said.
“They just need so many drivers that they are just absorbing the market.”
Last week, several inches of snow fell in Brown County. Being down drivers heading into the winter season means the highway department will have slower response times, Magner said.
“It takes us a lot longer to get all of the roads plowed. … What we used to be able to do in eight hours may take us 12 because we can’t assign a driver to each individual route, so it takes everybody longer to cover a bigger area,” he said.
“Just be patient, because it’s going to take longer.”
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Brown County Highway Superintendent Mike Magner received an award for his work in the county’s highway department at the Dec. 11 Brown County Commissioners meeting.
Duane Parsons presented it to Magner. Glass artist Susan Hirsch from San Diego, California, made the award. No county money was spent on it, said county commissioner Diana Biddle.
“This year we would like to honor one person who goes that extra step to try and not only perform the duties of the office that this person works out of, but also to try and please the public in general,” Parsons said. “It’s impossible to satisfy everyone, but if you can do your best to satisfy all that you can, then you have performed your job. We feel that this person fulfills that duty.”
Commissioner Diana Biddle applauded Magner for his work this winter while dealing with storm damage at his own home. A 60-foot tree fell through the second story of his house a couple weeks ago.
Commissioner Jerry Pittman mentioned the work Magner did to get grant funding to pave roads through the Indiana Department of Transportation’s Community Crossings program. The county has paved more than 100 miles of roads in four years using both grants and state funding.
“We really appreciate what Mike does,” Pittman said.
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To inquire about open jobs at the Brown County Highway Department, contact Superintendent Mike Magner at 812-988-4545 or [email protected].
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