Pay increases on county’s agenda

Proposed budget to include cost of body camera data storage

LITTLE ROCK — Salary increases and funding for data storage of Pulaski County sheriff’s office body cameras are the most costly items to be reviewed Tuesday night by the Pulaski County Quorum Court when deciding on its projected $86 million general fund budget.

Revenue for 2022 is expected to be about $4 million more than the proposed $82 million in revenue for 2021, Pulaski County Comptroller Michael “Hutch” Hutchens said Thursday. He said this allows the county to spend more.

“We feel very comfortable,” Pulaski County Judge Barry Hyde said recently. “In spite of the pandemic and instability and the workforce, I think I can safely tell the community that revenues are stable, our reserves are still solidly in place and we don’t expect any disruption in the budget. Beyond that, we expect it to be business as usual going forward.”

The county’s budget comes from sales tax, court fines and property tax, he said.

The county’s revenue has increased with the rise of property values, he said.

Covid-19 stimulus money also has helped ease expenditures in 2021, he said. Yet, the funding is reserved for certain expenses, such as cleaning and protective equipment.

The county likely will receive more revenue than it will spend in 2022, Hutchens said, though the budget is a projection.

“I’m trying to outguess an economy,” he said. “You can look at the numbers for so long but it is a guess. As long as I’ve been doing it, I’ve always been close.”

The Pulaski County Budget Committee amended the 2022 proposed budget Tuesday night to include raises for employees up to 4%. The raises will be based on a 2017 market study completed by the Johanson Group, Hutchens said.

The group created a market comparison to other government groups, nonprofits and private companies that compete with the county for employees. It then set a new pay scale that it said the county needed to reach to be competitive in the market.

Hutchens said the budget amendment will bring county employees from 92% to 96% of the market pay scale created by the group.

The pay increase could vary by employee, he said. This could include a couple dozen employees not seeing any raise because they are already at or above the 96% line.

The increase could also bring the lowest paid county employees up to about $15 an hour, pay that can be found at some entry-level fast-food jobs in the area, he said.

As of Thursday, Hutchens didn’t know the exact cost of the raises to the county budget, but he projected about $2 million.

Hyde said the raises are needed to compete with other employers in the market.

“I’m worried we are going to see an expansive amount of inflation by 2023 in hiring,” Hyde said.

County employees received a 2% raise in April. The raise was delayed as the county monitored the economy during the pandemic, Hyde said.

“After the first quarter of the year, they decided it looked like things were going OK,” Hyde said.

The sheriff ’s office also will see about $900,000 for storage of video data, Hutchens said.

“Body cameras are a twoedged sword,” Hutchens said. “You have this documentation that will hopefully help you, but you have to manage all of it and that is a huge amount of data.”

He said most cameras are purchased with grants but the ongoing expense comes in storing the data.