By Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
City council members got their first look at the city’s proposed 2023-2024 budget on Aug. 8 and spent some time discussing a proposed 7 percent pay increase for non-civil service employees.
Following the presentation of the budget by City Manager John Sheedy, City Finance Director Alberta Barrett went over highlights of the budget and spoke about the proposed employee pay increases.
Barrett first reviewed a history of the city’s pay increases for employees over the past seven years.
“The biggest expense the city has is our (employee) salaries and benefits, so you have up on the dais and on the screen some history on our salaries and benefit costs. The graph shows the actual expenses since 2016, every year and the chart at the bottom shows actual expenses, the dollar increase per year and then back at the top it shows (percentage increases.)
“So in 2017, there was a 5 percent increase in salaries and benefits, a 1.31 (percent increase) in 2018, 2.81 percent in 2019 and then we had a decrease in 2020, and then the (following year) we made some strong efforts to increase our salaries and our benefits, and I have to thank the council because they approved us doing this, which raised our ceiling, which allowed us to provide more salary and benefits to our employees,” Barrett told the council.
“So in 2021, we did our first reclassification of (employee) positions. Some of you were on the council then, and our non-exempt personnel received almost $760,000 increases in salaries. The part-timers received almost $60,000. And that was just our non-exempt and part-time non-civil service, and that increase was 7.57 percent, almost 8 percent.
“In the next year, 2022, we continued that with the second reclassification, which was for our exempt personnel, and that totaled a little over $500,000, and the city had an increase of about 3.75 percent cost that went on to our employees,” Barrett said.
“In 2023, the increase was 4.82 percent, and then in this year that we’re projecting, 2024, we’re projecting almost 11 percent, and that’s going to include several things. But as you can see there, 80 percent of the (pay and benefit) increases have happened in the last four years of the last eight years,” she said.
“So in this 2024 projection, we’re proposing a 7 percent cost-of-living increase for all non-civil service employees,” Barrett said.
She said a portion of the proposed increase will beef up employees’ retirement contributions.
“We’ve included an increase for retirement for the employees. Right now the employees put 5 percent of their gross salary into the retirement plan. The city matches it, two-to-one. So what we’re proposing is to allow employees to raise that to 6 percent of their gross salary, and again, the city will continue to match it, two-to-one.” Barrett said.
Barrett also reminded the council the city would see an increase in its health and dental premiums of about 5 percent.
She also noted the city’s proposed budget includes only one new position, that of parks and recreation director.
Barrett said administrators came up with the proposed salary increase by conducting a salary survey. She said they also looked at the local public school district’s salaries for comparable positions, as well as salaries in 11 cities similar to Del Rio.
Barrett then showed council members a slide depicting what the proposed increases in the 2023-2024 budget looked like for a representative sample of city positions.
In 2020, for example, a city custodian/laborer/groundskeeper was paid a starting salary of $10 an hour. In the proposed 2023-2024 budget, that same position will be paid $13.67 per hour, she said.
“So they will have a cumulative increase (from 2020) of about 33 percent,” Barrett said.
Some of the increases for other positions, she noted, are even higher.
“This just really makes them competitive with the school district and these other cities that we surveyed,” Barrett said.
Sheedy also told the council his administration’s “priority of priorities” has been increasing employees’ salaries.
“I think that we have made tremendous progress, and we plan on continuing to do that,” Sheedy said.
Mayor Al Arreola asked about director positions and above and asked if they would be given raises as well.
Barrett said only about four city employees answer directly to the city council, and it is the council’s decision whether or not to increase their salaries.
Barrett said the 7 percent cost-of-living adjustment is included for those employees, adding the council could also decide “to do something different” for those employees.
“So everybody is going to get the 7 percent?” Arreola asked.
“That is correct,” Barrett said.
Sheedy added it is important for the cost-of-living adjustments to be consistent.
“If we do different COLAs, that’s when we start getting . . . these problems that we have to come back and fix,” Sheedy said.
“We went to great effort to get this pay table into a consistent, escalating growth. At some point, if we start pulling positions out, and giving them different increases, that are not related to the pay scale, then it distorts it for all employees, so all the work we put into it would be for naught,” Barrett said.
Arreola said he had brought up the question because a 7 percent pay increase for someone making $100,000 a year is vastly different from someone making $13 (slightly over $27,000 a year).
Arreola said he wanted to make sure the pay increases “are consistent and fair.”
“If I can clarify, the 7 percent is for all personnel, all employees. The reclassification is just the non-exempt, the lower level employees, and you’re talking about $800,000 that the city is putting, just toward those positions. That’s what’s included in this budget,” Barrett said.
