18-07-13 Memo from County Judge re: compensation

MEMO

To: Travis County Commissioners Court
CC: Jessica Rio, County Executive of Planning and Budget
Tracey Calloway, Director of Human Resources Management Department
From: County Judge Sarah Eckhardt
Date: July 13, 2018

RE: Ideas regarding compensation for the FY19 Budget process

Congratulations on achieving considerable and early consensus on most of our compensation decisions! Based on our conversation at Tuesday’s voting session, I believe the outstanding compensation issues have scoped down to the following two:

• What are your preferences on the use of the 1% Reserve (approximately $2.3M – $2.55M)?
• What are your preferences for addressing POPS?

With regard to the 1% Reserve, staff will be pulling together statistics comparing:

• The amount the 1% represents per department
• The cost of addressing compression per department

This should give us information on the delta that could be available per department to address other retention issues.

With regard to POPS, our officers are still at the top of the market at minimum and maximum of their pay grades. The Court has already achieved consensus on $3M in compensation adjustments for POPS:

• Continued Step Increases $1.7M
• Continuation of vacation time pay-out $300K
• Introduction of Shift Differential $1M

In addition to these compensation adjustments, the preliminary budget contemplated a 2% adjustment ($2.4M) to the pay scale for planning purposes. The Human Resources Management Department does not see a market rationale for a wholesale adjustment to the pay scale but does see:

• Recruitment rationale for an adjustment to the bottom of the pay scale
• Equity and retention rationale for addressing red-lined employees at the top of the pay scale

Raising the floor of POPS to $40K for cadets and providing a 2% raise for red-lined POPS employees who have reached the ceiling of their paygrade and are therefore ineligible for a Step Increase is well within the $2.4M planning parameters. What are the Court’s preferences for the remainder of the $2.4M?

• Budget reduction
• Additional compensation
• Additional FTE – The Sheriff has made a significant request for five additional detectives; I strongly support using $1M to grant her request