Thumbnail photo by Paul Critz
Updated at 8:42 p.m. Thursday to correct an error, an employee being hired at a Step C would top out about a year later at Step E and would then have to wait roughly nine years before reaching longevity, according to Norma Williams, Del Norte County Employees Association SEIU 1021.
With the president of Del Norte County’s largest bargaining unit warning that the practice was creating a retention problem, the Board of Supervisors took no action on five requests to hire staff at a more advanced step on the salary schedule.
Two weeks earlier Norma Williams, president of the Del Norte County Employees Association SEIU 1021, told supervisors that their hiring at Step C was fast becoming a standard. On Tuesday, noting that negotiations with county administration were scheduled for Thursday, Williams said the union seeks clarity on the hiring process.
Williams also noted that the length of time an employee has before they reach longevity is shorter if they are hired in the middle of the salary range than an entry-level worker. According to Williams, if a new employee is approved at a Step C after being hired, he or she would top out at Step E about a year later. They would then have to wait about nine years before reaching longevity where they would get a 5% pay increase, she said.
Until then, Williams said, the only pay increases that employee would see is any SEIU 1021 and county agree on.
“I had a conversation recently with an employee in SEIU who’s at a supervisory level. She has five years before she makes longevity,” she told supervisors on Tuesday. “However, others in the same range and classification — supervisory level — are already at longevity and they’re making more than she does. Her comment to me is, ‘Why would I want to stay here?’”
District 5 Supervisor Dean Wilson pulled the five items from the Board’s consent agenda for discussion. Supervisors were asked to approve a Step C salary placement for an office assistant, two integrated case workers and a social worker within the Department of Health and Human Services as well as a child support specialist with the Child Support Services department.
Wilson said he and his colleagues had allowed department heads to offer a higher placement on the salary schedule to new hires to “fill much-needed positions.” Their requests for Board approval come as county administration figures out how to respond to a compensation and structural analysis showing that base salaries were 10% below the market median.
“If we did these approvals today and the comp changes to into effect before the end of the year, this would give these positions a distinctive increase above and beyond what the intent of that process was,” Wilson said. “We had discussed not allowing these until the new process had gone into place. My purpose for pulling these at this time is because the Step C advantage being put forward and allowed by departments is going to be, hopefully, unnecessary.”
In September, Wilson and his colleagues learned from Human Resources Director Kerri Vue that the county’s overall vacancy rate was 25%. At that same meeting on Sept. 9, representatives with the international consulting firm, Gallagher, informed the Board that though the county’s base salaries were 10% below the market median, its overall compensation package was 2.1% above the market median.
Supervisors, however, told Gallagher representatives that their analysis and recommendations fell short of their expectations, relying on data points they said were inconsistent. As a result, County Administrative Officer Neal Lopez said he and his team would work internally to create a master compensation schedule using entry-level salaries as the dataset.
On Tuesday, Lopez said county administration was still negotiating with SEIU 1021 and the bargaining group representing middle management employees. While he couldn’t give specifics, Lopez told Redwood Voice Community News on Tuesday that those negotiations revolve around Gallagher’s compensation analysis, though he noted that its implementation is extremely complex.
Gallagher had based its compensation analysis on the maximum salary an employee could earn before achieving their longevity steps, Lopez said, which wasn’t what county supervisors had asked for.
“That maximum salary is different for different employee groups,” he said. “From a structural standpoint, they weren’t using consistent datapoints — they weren’t using Step A to Step A on all of our salary schedules — and they weren’t using consistent data points for all county classifications. And that’s where we kind of hit a stalling point or roadblock with them.”
Lopez said he and his team tried telling the Gallagher consultants that their recommendations were creating “massive compaction between supervisors and those they supervise.”
“Someone being supervised was now making more than the person supervising them because they weren’t using consistent datapoints,” he said. “They were sticking to their guns on their approach and we had to move away from that part of this project and handle it internally.”
At Tuesday’s meeting, District 3 Supervisor Chris Howard asked Lopez to weigh in on whether the policy of hiring at a Step C rather than a Step A was being followed accurately. Howard said he thought the department director needed to approach the Board for approval.
According to Lopez, only the Board of Supervisors can approve hiring a new employee at a position higher than Step A on the salary schedule. That was the language written in the county’s agreement with its bargaining units, he said.
“These offers that are being made to employees should actually include Board approval prior to the offer,” he said. “Past practice hasn’t always been that way. I think it’s been kind of a little bit more an expectation over the past couple of years due to the vacancy rates we’ve experienced in Del Norte County and one criteria is a hard to fill position and that could almost apply to all of our positions in Del Norte County, but, yes, based on the language in the MOU it should come to the Board first.”
District 2 Supervisor Valerie Starkey said she was struggling with whether or not the Board should approve the salary placements for the five positions. Four out of five are within the Department of Health and Human Services, which has a high vacancy rate.
Lopez said the Child Support Services Department has also struggled with a high staff vacancy rate for several years.
DHHS Director Ranell Brown said the overall vacancy rate in her department is about 34%. However within the office assistant classification, the vacancy rate is 33% and the integrated case worker classification is experiencing a 42% vacancy rate. She said her department made the job offers to the new hires in September, before the Board decided to suspend the practice of approving higher salary placements.
Brown also noted that new hires start at Step A if their start date is before their position comes to the Board for approval.
“When we submitted them in September that was the request was to have them (start) at a Step C, that was before the direction of the Board,” she said. “I can’t speak for HR, sometimes the offer is made at a A and then the candidate comes back and says ‘I’d like to request it at a higher (range), would the department be open to that?’ And then we give our feedback.”
Williams, who said SEIU 1021 has the highest vacancy rate in the county and that all five positions were within the Del Norte County Employees Association bargaining group, said she was confused about the Board’s wanting to freeze their hiring practice when it comes to salaries.
“That’s something the union would want clarified on Thursday before we start negotiations,” she said. “Right now, I’m sitting here thinking to myself, what the heck are you guys doing?”
