F-16 pilot and nurse set down in DC Ranch
Renovated home provides firm spot for family to land
“I yearned for a stable and continuous upbringing for my kids.” Jenn Hansel
Life in the U.S. Air Force can be an adventure: seeing new places, moving around, meeting new people. However, it also can increase a longing for a forever home.
Rob and Jenn Hansel met in 2010 at a concert they attended with mutual friends at Toby Keith’s Bar and Grill, and they married two years later. Before meeting Jenn, Rob had trained at the Air Force Academy. After pilot training for the F-16 in Mississippi, he served in Germany, Las Vegas, Iraq and Phoenix.
“My favorite place I was stationed was Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany . ... I got to see much more of the world by being there,” Rob said.
“The unpredictability of Air Force life definitely made us yearn for a stable forever home where our kids could grow up without having to change schools and friends every few years,” Jenn said.
Jenn did not grow up in a military family, but her family moved to five different states when she was a child. “I yearned for a stable and continuous upbringing for my kids,” she said.
Potlucks and parks in Scottsdale
After settling in Scottsdale, the couple purchased what they felt would be their forever home. Jenn worked as a labor and delivery nurse, and they were content living in Scottsdale. However, after having two boys, they realized their neighborhood didn’t have many families.
“We had to leave the neighborhood to go trick-or-treating,” Jenn said.
On Halloween of 2018, they decided to look at a house in DC Ranch near their friends’ home. In a prime location, the gated community was a dream. As for the house, it wasn’t love at first sight. The couple wasn’t happy with the amount of work that it would take to make it feel like their own.
That evening, friends encouraged them to stay and experience the neighborhood. “There were parties at every house and a potluck in the park,” Jenn said. “It was almost a competition to see who had the best decorations.”
Jenn was hooked. They waited to see what else would come on the market.
Change of heart in DC Ranch
After the holidays, the DC Ranch home was still for sale. After viewing the approximately 3,000-square-foot home with fresh eyes, they began to see the potential.
They purchased the four-bedroom, four-bath house in January and began renovations with contractor Dan Miccolis of D.R. Miccolis LLC.
First on the agenda: Remove the black slate floors and yellow walls. They installed gray wood tile throughout the home and painted the walls Dunn Edwards Whisper Gray. Patterned black and white tile floors gave the laundry room extra personality. They replaced the traditional light fixtures with more modern black fixtures, including Edison bulbs and glass.
“I’d say my style is probably a modern/transitional farmhouse vibe,” Jenn said. “You won’t see many colors at my house.”
Jenn’s monochromatic color scheme is far from boring. The relaxing palette is pleasing to the eye.
The most difficult part of the reno
First Solar, a maker of solar panels headquartered in Tempe, Arizona, calculated two ratios after identifying that its median employee was a full-time worker located in Malaysia. CEO Mark Widmar’s compensation of roughly $7 million was 530 times the $13,269 nominal pay earned by this worker. First Solar also applied a cost-of-living adjustment, giving the Malaysian worker modified U.S.-equivalent pay of $79,481 and reducing the gap to 88-to-1.
Conversely, many companies pay high median compensation, including roughly $171,000 at Exxon Mobil, $132,000 at Visa and $92,000 at Merck. The pay ratios at those corporations were 110-, 147- and 228-to-1, respectively.
Among Arizona companies, some of the highest compensation for workers was reported by Pinnacle West Capital, parent of electric utility Arizona Public Service, where the median employee earned $133,779, and by finance company Store Capital Corp. ($121,638).
Explanation of policies
Many companies provide the minimum required information, with little or no elaboration. Others take the opportunity to expound on broader employee-compensation practices.
At Amazon, CEO Jeff Bezos’ compensation of $1.68 million in 2018 was a modest 58 times that earned by the median Amazon employee globally, who earned $28,836 (the median pay for Amazon’s American workers was $35,096).
The online-retailing giant used this discussion to point out that its new $15 hourly U.S. minimum wage took effect Nov. 1 and thus didn’t apply for most of 2018, with the implication that the CEO pay ratio will narrow in coming years.
Incidentally, Bezos’ highly simplified pay package includes an annual salary of just $81,840. The world’s richest man made it to that lofty status from his massive ownership of Amazon shares, rather than salary or other annual perks.
Filling in the blanks
Publicly owned companies disclose reams of information on a yearly basis, covering financial statements, business conditions, lawsuits, large shareholders, executive pay and much more. Yet corporations haven’t been required to tell much about their employees and many companies have been quite reticent.
The new required disclosure of CEO to median-worker pay is an important step toward greater transparency in this area.
Anyone can look up pay-ratio numbers for public corporations, though it often takes some effort.
The information is disclosed in annual corporate proxy reports, most of which are released from February through May and can be viewed online using the EDGAR search service provided by the Securities and Exchange Commission at sec.gov. Look for “DEF14A,” which is short for “definitive proxy statement.”
Once you find a company’s proxy statement, the pay-ratio disclosure usually follows the Summary Compensation Table, a standardized chart listing pay for the top executives. But compared with the 20 or 30 pages some companies devote to explaining their CEO compensation, the section tied to worker pay usually garners only a few paragraphs.