A committee which has been studying how county employees are paid compared to other counties in the state is recommending that some employees receive a pay increase, but not all of them.

The county council is not planning an across-the-board, cost-of-living pay raise for 2019.

The employees who could see a pay bump under the recommendations include the jail commander, first deputies in the treasurer’s and recorder’s offices, a part-time employee in Veterans Affairs and the county’s computer network technician.

The adjustments equal about $17,000 total, which would come out of the county’s general fund. In addition, the recorder office’s perpetuation fund would pay for a part-time employee to go up a pay grade and get an extra $1,200.

Other recommendations for changes in pay would affect the county highway department, at a total of about $23,000. That money would come from the highway department’s budget.

The committee — made up of Brown County Council President Keith Baker and council members Darren Byrd and Glenda Stogsdill — was formed early this year to analyze how competitive Brown County’s compensation is compared to like-size and neighboring, larger counties.

“It’s been many, many years since we’ve done a really good, thorough analysis of where our compensation is and how competitive we are with like-sized counties and neighboring counties,” Baker said.

The county council and county commissioners started talking about doing a salary study in early 2017. In a March 2017 council meeting, Brown County Auditor Beth Mulry said she wanted to know whether or not there’s a consistent pattern throughout county government of what certain jobs pay, but she said that the discussion actually originated with the county commissioners.

“All of the past years, department heads have come to us at budget time saying, ‘Hey, I want this increase and I want that increase,'” Baker said.

“I can tell you that some of the department heads this past year had asked us for really elevated changes in their pay, and when I sat down with them, I said, ‘Hey, within the scope of money we have to spend, let’s do what’s fair and the best we can possibly do. No, you ain’t getting that. We may be able to justify a little bit of a bump.’”

Initially, the county council was looking at doing a salary study with a Muncie company that would have cost $39,000 to $70,000. Instead, the council reached out to the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University about having graduate students do it. The council received that report in December, then did some additional work on it.

“While it contained some very valuable data and recommendations, it lacked some of the key elements needed to complete the task at hand,” the committee’s salary study states. “Missing was a complete job-by-job county comparison, input from department heads/employees or any examination/discussion of employee position descriptions. Essentially, it was only a good place to start.”

“The students didn’t really understand what some of our jobs were, so it was really hard to pick comparisons among other counties,” Baker explained at the May 21 council meeting. “Many of the smaller counties, the position descriptions are different.”

The council’s salary study committee interviewed department heads, went through the current salary ordinance and made sure it was correct for each of the 160 employees.

The other counties they studied were Pike, Perry, Blackford, Switzerland and Crawford counties, along with neighboring, larger counties like Monroe and Bartholomew. Four of those counties were identified by IU as like-size counties to Brown.

“I want to stay aware of what we can’t pay,” Baker said of the larger county comparison. “The comparison really was with the small, like-size counties.”

After eliminating some identical jobs at the same pay grade, like clerks and highway truck drivers, Baker was able to narrow down the comparison to 60 jobs.

Because pay may vary based on how long an employee has been with the county, Baker said the committee had to call counties to get the average salary for some jobs. “We were able to finally come up with, I think, pretty good averages,” he said.

The findings

Overall, Brown County is paying competitive wages, the committee found.

That’s why they advised against giving an across-the-board cost-of-living raise to county employees when 2019 budgets are made this summer.

The county council approved two- or three-percent raises in 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017 and 2018 for all employees. That helped bring Brown County’s pay up to where it needed to be, Baker said.

“Do we pay a competitive average for a job as much as we can with our pay base? I believe we do,” Baker said about how the county compared to like-size counties. “… Literally 90 percent or more of our jobs, we are No. 1 — not by far, but we’re No. 1.”

Baker said the committee’s study and the IU study also found that Brown County has a “far above average” medical plan. Brown County also pays employees $100 more per year for each year they stay with the county. No other like-size county offers that, Baker said.

“The other small counties kind of throw a dart at the board at their annual meetings of, ‘Well, this person has been with us for 10 years, let’s jack up their pay a little bit.’ That’s so subjective. What that really ends up doing is hurting morale among your employees. You need one fair system. … Now that I understand it better, the longevity system we have I think is fair and impartial. That’s why we have it.”

The county also leads in Public Employee Retirement Plan (PERF) contributions among like-sized counties by paying 11.2 percent to that fund for each eligible employee.

Brown County also has the highest number of paid holidays each year —  15 or 16 depending on whether there is an election or not.

No other small county offers free term life insurance, either. “We changed that several years ago, because we had an employee who died immediately after turning 65 and their family got a lot less,” Baker said.

Going unfilled

Baker said the “biggest hole” they found in salary comparisons is at the Brown County Highway Department.

In like-sized counties to Brown, truck drivers are paid $2,000 or $3,000 more than they are here. “Among the larger, neighboring counties, those same truck driver jobs pay an average of $7,000 to $8,000 more than we pay,” Baker said.

“That’s just 15 miles down the road. Guess when we lose truck drivers, guess where they are going? They are going to work for the state, Morgan or Bartholomew County, and that’s a big problem for us.”

The county has two truck drivers jobs currently open, and they’ve been open for awhile, Baker said.

Under the committee’s recommendation, truck drivers would be bumped from a 5H pay grade to an 8H. For 2018, a grade 5H equals $30,722; a grade 8H makes $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.

Baker said he wants Brown County Highway Superintendent Mike Magner to continue working on making a senior truck driver designation for employees who learn how to drive tri-axles or how to spread chemicals. “It doesn’t make sense to have a guy be here eight or 10 years be paid the same exact number, other than longevity, as the person who started yesterday,” Baker said. “The bottom line is we want to try and retain them.”

The salary recommendations for the county highway department will cost around $23,000.

Baker said that due to the empty truck driver jobs and, until recently, one in the front office, Magner had $100,000 unused in his salary and overtime budget at the end of the year.

Pay and population

Resident Sherrie Mitchell asked the council about why the county has been employing more people when the population is declining. She estimated the county had grown by 22 employees over five years.

“The need for providing services doesn’t change,” Baker said. “We have to provide the same services as Bartholomew County, the same offices, the same kinds of jobs and everything.”

He questioned the total she had given of 22 new jobs. “During my time it’s more like five or six, but it’s an interesting question,” he said.

Byrd said that every county has a “certain minimum level of service.”

“If your population drops by another 50 percent, you can’t cut down to half of an auditor. It’s a mandated position,” he said.

Mitchell said the new jobs that had been created were not an auditor, assessor or treasurer.

“We’ll take a look at that, Baker said. “In the 10 to 12 years I’ve been around, there’s been two jailers, two police officers, we picked up two part-time people at parks and rec and someone for the veterans,” Baker said.

Council Vice President Dave Critser said the additional jailers were required by the state. “The state said we should pick up five; we picked up two,” he said.

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One recommendation the study committee discussed was bumping the jail commander job up to a pay grade 15. It’s currently at a pay grade 13. Other county department heads are at a pay grade 16.

In 2018, a pay grade 13 will make $37,257, a grade 15 will make $39,491, and a grade 16 will make $40,605, not counting any longevity pay.

Brown County Council President Keith Baker said the current jail commander, Tony Sciscoe, deserves that raise because the jail has had inspections that are free of discrepancies for as long as he’s been there. Also, four of the five jailers he supervises are paid more than he is because he doesn’t get overtime pay and they do, Baker said.

“In like-size, small counties, their jail commanders are paid $2,000 or $3,000 more than ours. In the large, neighboring five counties, their jail commanders are paid $20,000 more than ours,” Baker said.

For sheriff’s deputies in neighboring counties, the average pay is $48,000. Those are the counties to which Brown County loses deputies.

Baker said that compared to other small counties, our deputies’ pay is “right where they need to be and we can’t do much better than that.”

However, the committee did recommend that deputies who are certified as instructors get $250 annually for each certification, up to $1,500. Having to send officers out of county for training costs the county money in overtime pay, so having local trainers is a cost-saver.

A third recommendation was to increase the part-time employee’s compensation at the Veterans Affairs office up one pay grade to a grade seven, which means about $542 more a year, at $30,562. This person does veteran counseling, Baker said.

The study committee also recommended moving the county’s computer network technician up a pay grade to 14, at a cost of $893 per year. That employee works 80 percent of a work week now. A grade 14 at full time makes $38,374.

Baker said other like-size counties contract out IT and geospatial information science (GIS) map work instead of having people on staff to do it. In two counties, the assessor is trained to do GIS work, such as attaching property record cards to parcels on the online map.

In the neighboring, larger counties, a network engineer is paid an average of $7,000 more a year, Baker said. Moving Brown County’s network technician a pay grade is “an investment in that person, to show how much we value our network technician here,” he said. “We don’t want them to go away. That’s a small price if we were to lose that.” Training someone new would be difficult, he said.

The committee also recommended giving the county maintenance/IT director call-out pay for when he has to respond to emergencies overnight. The cap is $1,500 per year. The EMA director, highway superintendent and highway assistant superintendent already receive call-out pay.

Another recommendation was to raise the pay grades for first deputies in key county offices which “carry a lot more responsibility, a lot more personal or professional or monetary liability to us as a county.”

Chief deputies in the treasurer’s and recorder’s offices would go up to a pay grade nine, $32,792, which is equal to the deputies in other smaller county offices, like the assessor. That would cost the county about $1,100 for both.

Chief deputies in the larger departments, like the clerk’s and auditor’s offices, already are paid at a grade 10 or 11. The salary for a grade 10 is $33,911 and for grade 11 is $35,023.

Baker also recommended bumping up two-part time jobs in the treasurer’s and recorder’s offices to a pay grade seven from a six. The recorder’s office will pay for its part-timer’s increase out of its own funds. A grade six makes $29,447 and a grade seven makes $30,562.

The committee also recommended moving a deputy in the assessor’s office from a pay grade seven to an eight. A grade eight makes $31,677.

“It’s important for me that we send a big signal to our employees downstairs that we really, really value what they do, even though they don’t work in a large department. It doesn’t take us a whole lot to do that,” Baker said.

Any changes made to salaries would start in 2019, he said.

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