New plan in motion

Personnel consulting firm Waggoner, Irwin and Scheele is beginning work on a new county pay plan after getting the OK to proceed from the Jay County Council Wednesday night.
The council agreed to hire the firm to overhaul the county’s current plan, which has become difficult to manage because of wage adjustments and exceptions made by the council over the years.
Addie Knott and Paula Reimers, consultants for Waggoner, Irwin and Scheele, presented the council with an overview of the Factor Evaluation System plan for job classification and compensation.
The plan will separate position pay and other compensation, such as longevity pay, unlike the county’s current system which has the two pieces combined in series of pay “steps” and “levels.”
“It sorts positions by job category,” explained Knott. “The foundation of this system is the job descriptions.”
The FES system divides all positions into four categories – PAT, professional, administrative and technological (accountants, engineers, registered nurses); COMOT, computer, office, machine, operation, and technician (bookkeepers, court reporters, secretaries); POLE, protective occupations and law enforcement (police, jailers); and LTC, labor trades and crafts (highway employees, cooks, custodians).
Knott said this system keeps like positions together so that if market forces in one area change — as an example she cited when police and emergency worker pay increased following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks — those adjustments can be made without affecting other positions.
Knott explained that the core of the system is the job descriptions, which will be completed by employees filling out questionnaires identifying what responsibilities they have in their position. Those questionnaires will then be reviewed by department heads for accuracy before being sent to Waggoner, Irwin and Scheele, to be “factored,” which will determine the appropriate pay for that description.
“This system doesn’t do anyone any good if the data in the questionnaire isn’t accurate and honest,” Reimers said. “The employee is filling it out and the department head, supervisor, is signing off on that.”
Reimers said the job description allows the firm to establish a baseline pay that does not change depending on the employee. Any employee in that position would be paid the same amount.
“We want to stay away from focusing on the employee,” Reimers said. “People come and go and the job is what remains.”
The job description will form only a baseline pay for that position. The council will then discuss with the firm what it wants to do for additional compensation such as longevity, which the council has expressed an interest in, and performance pay, which it hasn’t had for years in the county after running into issue with it in the past.
“We’re giving you the compensation for the jobs,” Reimers said. “We really want the job to be separate from all other pay.”
The additional compensation would be exclusive to the employee and therefore could be kept if the employee changes positions since it is added to their total pay separately from the compensation determined by the position.
Since compensation is tied directly to the job description, Reimers said the system helps eliminate employees asking for arbitrary pay raises, because if the responsibilities of the position haven’t dramatically changed, the pay will not change either.
The system also makes it easier to apply pay increases, since a percentage raise can be made to only the baseline pay without factoring in longevity.
“This system has proven to be very easily maintained,” Knott said.
Council members questioned what other government agencies are utilizing this system and how long some of them have been on it.
Knott and Reimers said that counties using the FES include Madison, Whitley, Huntington, LaGrange, Wabash and Fulton among others. Knott said one of the firm’s first clients to implement the FES, the city of Anderson, has been using it since the 1980s.
“I think it would be money well spent,” said councilman Ted Champ.
The councilman unanimously approved hiring the firm to begin work on the pay plan. Knott and Reimers didn’t have an exact cost, but an estimate delivered to the council last month came in around $40,000. The council agreed to pay the cost from its rainy day fund.
Reimer presented council members with a timeline for the project, which included meeting with department heads starting today. Questionnaires will be distributed and returned within a month. The firm will then begin reviewing the questionnaires and forming job descriptions.
The firm will return draft job descriptions to department heads and employees by mid-June for a final review, then will form final job descriptions by July and determine compensation figures to the county council for its August meeting.
In other business Wednesday night, the council:
•Approved several additional appropriations to reflect a fix made to the salary ordinance involving starting pay for full-time employees in the sheriff’s department, Jay Emergency Medical Service and highway department. The change was made to resolve an issue in which part-time employees would be getting paid more per hour than a full-time employee in the same position.
Appropriations were approved for the sheriff’s department, $728, $457.60 and $3,369.60; JEMS, $436.80; and highway, $3,348 and $1,123.20.
•Approved an appropriation of $47,000 to the sheriff’s budget to purchase two new vehicles. Sheriff Ray Newton said he will return quotes to the Jay County Commissioners on Monday.
•Made appropriations of $5,000 and $47,179.67 to the public defender’s office to hire additional attorneys.
Public defender Robert Beymer said the county is currently out of compliance with state regulations for the public defender program since the current staff’s case load is too high. Beymer said hiring another attorney should bring the county back into compliance and that he will be meeting with a state official on the topic.
•Appropriated $72,465.48 in innkeepers’ tax to Jay County Tourism. Tourism board member Al Confer requested last month that the money gathered in innkeepers’ tax in 2010 be paid out in three disbursements.
•Approved appropriations of $5,000 and $1,500 of probation user fees. Jay Circuit Court Judge Brian Hutchison said the $5,000 will be used to purchase new software to help digitize documents in the probation department reducing paper usage and the $1,500 is for office supplies, which was inadvertently left out of the 2011 budget.
•Approved an appropriation of $1,428 from the deferral fund to be used to purchase a subscription to an online stolen goods tracking program for the sheriff’s department. Jay County Prosecutor Wes Schemenaur said the sheriff’s office has made good use of the program, which helps locate stolen items.
•Approved an additional appropriation of $8,684.81 in Local Option Income Tax public safety funds to cover additional salary costs for the sheriff’s contract. Newton negotiated a four-year contract with the county in December for additional compensation in exchange for returning all leftover funds in his meals budget at the jail to the county.
•Made appropriations of $5,000 and $16,350 of grant funds to the Jay County Health Department to fund equipment purchases and additional wages for public health coordinator Robyn Fisher-Meyer, who is taking on additional duties.
•Appropriated $6,000 in infrastructure funds to pay for a new heating system at the JEMS base in Portland.
•Approved Economic Development Income Tax appropriations of $100,000 and $60,000.
The $100,000 is for a loan to IOM Grain, rural Portland, which will be used to purchase new equipment adding two or three new jobs. The loan will be a five-year term at a rate of prime plus 1 percent.
The $60,000 will be given as a grant to the Town of Bryant as part of the needing matching funds to secure $600,000 Office of Community and Rural Affairs grant to replace the town’s sewer system.
•Approved a transfer of $579.83 from the deferral fund to the prosecutor’s budget to cover a shortfall in the victim’s advocate salary line item.[[In-content Ad]]