Micromanaging Council Delays Employee Compensation Plan
Police Chief, Fire Chief Among Jobs that Haven’t had Merit Increases in 15 Years
While most of the Stow's city employees are covered by union contracts that ensure regular review of employee pay scales, about 50 employees who are not union members, including the heads of various departments, Fire Chief, Police Chief and executive assistants, haven’t had performance-based merit raises in 15 years.
Maintaining appropriate pay for some of the city’s most valued employees shouldn’t be this hard.
For the approximately 225 employees covered by bargaining agreements, contract negotiations are conducted every 3 years and typically completed, approved by Stow City Council and signed by the Mayor in about 10 days. Historically, this is pretty much standard operating procedure in public affairs -- just like in private business.
The five groups of bargaining-group employees have repeatedly been processed by the City of Stow over the years with little or no fanfare.
Pay scale review for the smaller non-union group of about 50 general employees went in a wildly different and tedious direction. While cost-of-living increases have been approved without issue, the inequity concerns the minimum and maximum pay scale for those employees, including the ability to provide merit raises. Not having a standardized process for implementing merit raises resulted in a number of personnel who supervise, direct, and lead various departments being underpaid compared to other cities around us.
This issue didn’t begin with this council. It goes back to 2008 but continued up through late September because of micromanaging and a lack of urgency on the part of City Council.
The Start of a Solution
In 2019, Stow City Council passed an ordinance to hire an outside law firm to review the pay inequities. After unexpected delays on the part of the outside contractor, the report was delivered in November 2022, which showed that Stow was lagging in pay rates for many employees compared to other nearby communities.
Below is a portion of the consultant's report on how Stow employee pay compares to other cities in the area. Noted in yellow are positions where the city's minimum and maximum pay scales lag that of other local communities and where the current hourly pay for a position lags the 90% of market rate goal that the consultant recommended:
Based on the information provided in the consultant's report, Chief of Staff and Public Service Director Nick Wren coordinated efforts to craft a new compensation policy for general employees, which would allow for merit increases of up to 6 percent tied to annual performance reviews. The legislation was introduced as ORDINANCE NO. 2023-081 at the April 26, 2023 Committee of the Whole meeting.
City Council further discussed the proposal at its May 11 and May 25 meetings. At its June 8 meeting, which would have been the third reading of three related ordinances, Council President and At-Large Councilman Jeremy McIntire moved to table the ordinances that would update the compensation policies for full-time and permanent part-time employees. McIntire, Ward 2 Councilwoman Sindi Harrison, Ward 3 Councilman Brian Lowdermilk and Ward 4 Councilman Mario Fiocca voted to table the legislation. Councilmen At-Large Cyle Feldman and David Licate and Ward 1 Councilman Matt Riehl voted against tabling the legislation.
Council Tables Employee Compensation Plan
The compensation policy was tabled at every meeting after, with McIntire saying council needed to further review the details.
Feldman moved to remove from table the issue on July 13 and Aug. 3, which was voted down. Feldman and Licate were incensed that council would need to further delay repairing a policy that had been ignored for so long.
See the council’s discussion about the tabling of this issue on July 13:
During the Aug. 3 council meeting, Feldman and Licate questioned why McIntire and Harrison were negotiating on behalf of council privately with the administration to make various changes rather than including the full council in discussions. Licate also warned that the city would lose valued employees and not be able to replace them if this issue weren’t quickly resolved. McIntire said another meeting with Chief of Staff and Public Service Director Nick Wren was scheduled for the end of the month.
See council’s discussion about the continued tabling of this issue on Aug. 3:
Where it’s taken an average of 10 days’ time for City Council to confirm the contracts negotiated by the administration for five groups of union employees, several members of city council, namely McIntire, Harrison and Lowdermilk, decided they wanted to negotiate their own deal with the administration.
Lowdermilk, in particular, fixated on comparing the proposed benefits package to what employers offer in private businesses. Wren explained that state law requires the city’s employees be enrolled in the state’s pension fund and that the compensation policy would bring the non-bargaining employees in line with the contracts council had approved for the union-represented groups.
See this exchange between Lowdermilk and Wren on May 25:
It’s Way Past Time Council Get Back in its Lane
Five months after introduction of the compensation plan to council, City Council was still hashing this out, until Sept. 28, when it voted 4-2 to approve it. Harrison, Riehl, Licate and Feldman voted to pass the updated compensation plan. McIntire and Fiocca voted against it. Lowdermilk was absent from the meeting for the final vote.
Harrison took the lead role in renegotiating with administration officials a final agreement and made the motion to untable the legislation. Did Harrison’s efforts result in the best outcome for the city and its employees? After no adjustments to a pay scale for 15 years, Harrison decided the consultant’s recommendations for updated hourly pay rates were too generous, and pushed those back by more than 6% from the proposed hourly rates.
Additionally, what had started out in April as a $250,000 allocation for merit raises in 2023 was pared down to $60,000 with the delay in action, meaning, that after 15 years of no merit raises, Stow employees will see on average about a $1,200 merit increase this year.
McIntire explained his continued opposition to the plan, which amounted to his wanting to personally approve every raise (for employees he doesn't supervise or necessarily even know) rather than have a process for department heads to manage the merit pay of their own employees based on annual performance reviews. Council will still manage cost-of-living increases and also have to approve the annual total amount that the administration could allocate for merit increases.
McIntire also expressed skepticism that employees who'd been with the city for an average of 17 years would suddenly start looking for jobs elsewhere. City employees have known for three years that the city was undertaking a compensation plan review, so many likely felt confident their loyalty would be rewarded. But, had the outcome been different and council not passed the plan, the city likely would have seen many of them leave for higher-paying cities or private companies.
See council’s discussion of the proposal, including McIntire’s objections, before the final vote:
Although Harrison's changes reduced the raises employees would receive this year, city officials accepted the approval of the overall plan as a win as the legislation now enables department heads to manage merit raises for their employees going forward.
Council ultimately approved the plan, but was it necessary for them to become directly involved in negotiating the details? No. It isn’t City Council’s expertise or purview to handle employee compensation negotiations. It is their duty to review and ask questions, to ascertain that the administration has followed proper procedure, considered all perspectives and relied on expertise and independent evaluation, in preparing the recommendations delivered to them. This level of overreach and extension of what in any other case takes about two weeks to accomplish has frustrated and angered the employees who work for our city and the many citizens who understand their value in delivering services to our community.
It is time for Stow City Council to get back to doing their jobs and stop pushing for powers outside of our city’s charter.
They are not doing the people’s work by renegotiating a compensation plan best left to the city’s administration and new HR director to finalize. By delaying appropriate compensation to the men and women who dedicate their careers to our city, they are unfairly labeling Stow as a community that does not take care of its public servants. It is shameful, bold-faced obstruction.
The citizens of Stow deserve a City Council that understands its role and that collaborates with city officials to get important business done without using every issue to score political points.
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