JOHN COFFELTEditor

The county Ad Hoc Pay/Benefits Committee dissolved following its June 3 meeting with a series of recommendations to the full commission suggesting how to address lagging employee pay and how to increase employee retention.

The gist of the recommendation outlines a plan that forgoes the county commissioning a formal salary study in favor of tasking department heads and the elected officials who oversee offices like the Register of Deeds, County Clerk and the Property Assessor to find salary shortcomings in their offices and report those to the Budget and Finance Committee for consideration in upcoming budgets.

The ad hoc committee agreed that salary shortfall might take more than one budget cycle to fix and anticipate a two year maximum.

Committee Member and Elections Administrator Andy Farrar said the broader, data-driven approach would address specific pay issues in the department and avoid the across-the-board approaches that only widen pay gaps between new hires and long term employees.

“Departments and elected officials should develop a salary range that details where an employee starts at the time of their hire per their job description,” reads the recommendations that will be further edited if accepted by the full commission on June 11.

The salary ranges that the plan asks for would be formulated using salary data that compares like departments, places with like revenue and similar number of employees in the office. Some departments like the Sheriff Department would likely need to use municipal agencies (Tullahoma and Manchester Police) for a comparison.

The ad hoc committee further recommended creating a three-member panel that could confirm the data and look at how those requests and report to Budget and Finance. The three-member panel would also study how the that department’s salary requests compare to other department employees.

The overall plan, as Farrar explained, the department heads would look at each position in their office, determine a salary range and then see where the employees fall in comparison to their years worked.

“If a standard rate for the industry standard is $37,000 on the low end, $54,000 on the top end, and (the employee is making $30,000) you know that job is underfunded by $7,000,” Farrar said.

“Using that same formula, an employee that’s doing the same job title that’s worked here 10 years—you take the low end and the top, and figure out where the range for 10 years should be. If that person should be at $42,000, but they’re at $37,000, now you know that employee is $5,000 (under),” Farrar said.

“You know exactly dollar amount that’s short. You submit that to Budget and Finance. It’s up to them to finance it,” Farrar said.

“Right now we don’t know what that amount is,” he said. “If it’s $500,000, …they can probably fund it. If comes back $2 million, maybe they can fund it over a couple of years and get it caught up. We don’t know what that dollar amount is; all we know is people are saying their department is underfunded.”

Commissioner Tim Stubblefield said that this will take some work from the department heads.

Farrar said that the most of the department heads were onboard and felt that the commission would likely work as fiscally possible any employee shortcomings.

“You’re always going to be responsible to the taxpayers,” he said. “If (the county) can’t fund it, we are back where we are. If you can fund it over two years, maybe you can. That’s up to Budget and Finance and the Commission.”

The recommendation from the ad hoc committee would save the county $25,000-$35,000 for a salary study.

John has been with the Manchester Times since May 2011. John has won Tennessee Press Association awards for Best News Photo and placed in numerous other categories. John is a 1994 graduate of Tullahoma High School, a graduate of Motlow State Community College and earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from Middle Tennessee State University. He lives in Tullahoma, enjoys painting, dancing and exploring the outdoors.