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City of West Bend common council votes 7-0 to approve compensation study

February 7, 2022 – West Bend, WI – A presentation was made Monday night at the West Bend common council meeting by McGrath Consulting regarding a recently completed compensation study.

The City of West Bend is having the most turnover in Public Works and with the Police Department. This study reviewed every department.

According to data the implementation to get all employees into new salary ranges the first-round cost is roughly between $535,000 to $560,000.

The council voted 7-0 to approve the plan; alderwoman Meghann Kennedy was excused from the meeting.

RECOMMENDATIONS:

The first one is with your public safety and the second one is going to be more or less in your utilities area. There are many of your employees that are going to the minimum and that creates what we call in-range compression when you have a range. We’ve suddenly shifted, maybe some long-term employees are towards the bottom of that salary range.

My recommendation is a pretty expensive price to pay to fix all at once. The city should look at that in increments on an annual basis to try to accelerate those individual employees through the range over a period of time.

POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS from McGrath Consulting:

On an annual basis, we want to make sure that those ranges are adjusted by an economic indicator of some sort, we call that a cost-of-living adjustment.

In addition, the employees need to continue to have annual adjustments; they need to be able to be able to progress through the ranges we’ve developed.

The third thing, that might have to happen over a period of time for an exceptional situation, is a market adjustment where you have a defined purpose for moving a specific classification. But if you’re going to do that, the purpose for doing that is to make sure the position holds to the market, it’s not a reason to move an individual employee to get them additional dollars. This market adjustment is intended for classifications and to keep the specific job classification competitive.

The last thing we recommend is you do a process similar to this, it could be a little bit more Mini, but I’m similar to this, at least every three to five years. That way, if you have had any types of adjustments in the market, you’re able to catch them before they become problems.

District 4 alderman Randy Koehler looked for some clarification in statements released about the study. “Just a couple of closing things your you said we’ve got the 10.46 years of average service, which is great. But then we have a 17.2% turnover rate, which is kind of contradictory means we’re probably losing our newer employees. And the majority of our turnover is within a couple of departments. However, I agreed this compensation needs to be done and needs to be implemented. But I don’t think the implementation of this compensation plan is going to eliminate our turnover problem. I think there’s other issues here that we as a council have to look at and figure out. That is my thoughts. Thank you.”

 

This is a working story and more information will be posted when details become available.

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