Alamance County’s commissioners have given the county’s administrators the go-ahead to spend up to $200,000 on mid-year raises that were proposed in the latest phase of a three-part study of staff compensation.
These pay hikes, which received a unanimous nod from the commissioners on Monday, amount to an average pay increase of .5 percent over the county’s entire 1,066-person staff. These adjustments are nevertheless based on a market analysis that zeroed in on about a third of the county’s payroll in order to obtain its staff-wide recommendations.
This particular analysis is ultimately just one part of a three-prong assessment that the county’s administrators had previously assigned the Baker Tilly consulting firm to conduct on the county’s behalf.
Baker Tilly had initially appeared before the commissioners in January with the first of phase of this tripartite study – which focused specifically on high-turnover positions in EMS, social services, and Alamance County’s jail. In response to the consultant’s recommendations, the commissioners agreed to tweak the county’s pay grades to bring them in line with the job market, as quantified by Baker Tilly, which led to an average wage increase of 1.7 percent for the whole county staff – and not just the departments that had been the subject of the study’s first phase.
Sarah Towne, a consultant with Baker Tilly, told the commissioners on Monday that her firm took a similar approach with the second phase of its pay study – which examined the competitiveness of wages across another third of Alamance County’s payroll.
In this, second phase of the study, Towne told the commissioners that she homed in on 111 “benchmark” positions within agencies that included the county’s 9-1-1 center, the health department, inspections and planning, and the sheriff’s field operations. Towne added that she compared the base salaries for these posts with their equivalents in 15 “peer organizations” as well as the salaries published by three national sources. She conceded that, in the end, her inquiries found Alamance County’s salaries for these 111 posts to be generally on par with the public-sector job market.
“Overall, the county is looking really competitive,” the consultant went on to conclude. “The county is 4.2 percent above market at the minimum, 1.8 above market at the midpoint, and .1 above market at the maximum…I’ll caveat that [by saying] that this is on average for your 111 positions. It does not indicate that all of your positions are competitive.”
In order to bring the county closer in line with the job market, Towne recommended modifications to the county’s entire pay structure – with repercussions that rippled beyond the departments and agencies in this particular phase of her study.
Towne went on to present the commissioners with two competing recommendations for implementing the results of the study’s second phase.
The first option that the consultant shared with the county’s governing board was to hike the base pay for the 123 positions that she said are currently situated below their optimal pay grade. Towne said that, under this option, the county’s minimum wage would go up from $14.44 to $14.54 an hour, while employees in the 123 affected positions would receive a cumulative bump of 2.4 percent in their annual wages. She added that this particular option would cost the county $126,023.80 over the course of the year – an increase of roughly 2 percent to the county’s overall payroll.
Towne’s second recommendation to the commissioners extended the proposed wage beyond a position’s base salary in order to account for a staff member’s longevity. To this end, she proposed additional increases to the suggested base salaries to ensure that every employee with subpar compensation is paid an extra 2 percent for each year of service. This recommendation also expanded the proposed benefits to many of the 928 employees whose compensation was already deemed to be in the appropriate pay grade. Under the consultant’s second proposal, the annualized costs of the suggested pay raises jumped to $336,537.22 – or roughly .5 percent of the county’s entire annual payroll.
Neither of Towne’s recommendations called for any increase to the 15 staff members whose wages were deemed to exceed their “correct,” market based paygrade – although the consultant stressed that, as per her firm’s standing policy, she doesn’t suggest any wage cuts for these top earners.
Alamance County’s manager Heidi York reminded the commissioners that the county’s current annual budget includes $400,000 to implement the second phase of Baker Tilly’s pay study – or more than enough to cover either of Towne’s two alternatives. York proceeded to urge the commissioners to implement the consultant’s second option since they had enacted a similar longevity bonus when they adopted the first phase of the pay study in January.
The county manager went on to suggest that the commissioners make the proposed salary adjustments effective as of January 1, 2025 – thereby incurring an anticipated cost of $168,268.66 in the current financial cycle. York nevertheless asked the commissioners for the latitude to spend up to $200,000 on the raises in order to account for any changes that have occurred to the county’s payroll since Baker Tilly dug into the numbers.
The commissioners ultimately voted 5-to-0 in favor of York’s recommendations. Even so, some members of the county’s governing board were skeptical of the actual impact that the proposed pay raises would have on the county’s most turnover-ridden positions.
Commissioner Craig Turner was particularly concerned that these compensatory adjustments will do little to prevent agencies like the department of social services from continuing to hemorrhage staff members.
“This model doesn’t account, in and of itself, for these hard-to-fill positions,” Turner told the rest of the commissioners, “so it’s leaving a gap that we aren’t meeting as a county.”
In response to Turner’s concerns, Candice Gobble, the county’s social service director, conceded that her own department’s recruitment efforts are hamstrung by a declining applicant pool as well as state-level regulations that demand a certain amount of salary separation between positions on different rungs of the hierarchy. Meanwhile, York alluded to absurdly high compensation that other counties are offering for higher-level social services posts.
“Our benchmark peers are not bringing in employees at the minimum or midpoint. They’re bringing in people way higher up,” she went on to explain. “I can tell you that we have seen the smaller counties upping their game, and we’re seeing offers that are staggering.”
In the end, the commissioners instructed the county’s administrators to come back with proposals like signing bonuses, which are already credited with eating away at the vacancies in the sheriff’s office, where they were introduced earlier this year.
