The Brown County Council has OK’d moving around money in the highway department’s budget to pay for raises for key employees this year.
About $6,700 was moved from the cumulative bridge, local road and street and the motor vehicle highway funds to help bump up pay for two crew leaders.
Last summer, a committee that studied how county employees are paid compared to other counties in the state recommended that some employees receive a pay increase. Those recommendations were approved during budget hearings last August and were included in the salary ordinance when it was approved in December.
The committee recommended that highway department truck drivers be bumped from a 5H pay grade to an 8H. For 2018, a grade 5H equaled $30,722; a grade 8H made $34,070.
The committee also recommended moving heavy machine operators, or employees who do ditching and work on bridges, from a 7H to a 8H pay grade — from $32,952 to $34,070.
Last fall, the committee was asked to look at their recommendations again to make sure no other pay increases were necessary. In December, former county council president Keith Baker, who chaired the committee, said that they were keeping their recommendations except for also giving a raise to the highway department’s bridge crew leader and the road crew leader. Those two would go from earning around $37,000 a year to around $38,000.
“Those two people are key, to me, that we take care of them, because those two people are the ones who would move to the neighboring six big counties. I think that’s important,” Baker said in December.
At the January council meeting, members voted to approve an amendment to the 2019 salary ordinance to include the two raises.
The other three additional appropriations the council approved for the highway department were for moving a $145,000 cash balance from the 2018 budget in the cumulative bridge line to the bridge construction line; $213,356 from the Salt Creek Trail fund to the survey engineering line; and $38,080 from the Salt Creek Trail line to the other distributions line.
“What we’ve done the last three years is whatever the balance was on Dec. 31, we transfer it over into next year’s budget, because back in July we had no idea what money would be left over for the end of the year. It’s just moving money from last year’s to this year’s budget,” said highway superintendent Mike Magner.
“Since we try to project the budget a year-and-a-half ahead of time, we just didn’t spend all of the money we had last year, so what we didn’t spend we’re just transferring over to our 2019 budget.”
The Salt Creek Trail money is dedicated by the Indiana Department of Natural Resources for the trail design, Magner said.
