Borough council president refutes payroll figures
School board member defends analysis in name of taxpayers
POTTSTOWN >> Borough Council President Dan Weand mounted a prepared rebuttal July 5 to last month’s charges by school board member Thomas Hylton that taxpayers are shouldering a 30 percent hike in payroll costs in the last four years.
Hylton made his comments at a council meeting last month, as well as in two paid advertisements in The Mercury.
Calling Hylton’s comparisons “a direct attack” and “erroneous information,” Weand read from a prepared statement and said he wanted to “set the record straight.”
He said Hylton compared “W-2 wages” from 2012 but used “gross compensation” figures for 2015, which was an unfair comparison.
Contacted by The Mercury Wednesday night, Hylton denied this.
“I made a Right to Know request to the borough for the W-2 forms from 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015 and I used what they gave me,” he said. “It was absolutely an apples-to-apples comparison and when I added it all up, we paid $2 million more in four years when inflation has hardly risen.”
Weand said the borough’s finance department had been asked to examine Hylton’s comparisons and said Hylton’s analysis did not account for things like pension payments, deferred savings, health savings accounts, promotions, lump sum payment to avoid base pay increases, or step increases inside a contract.
“Using W-2s is not an accurate way to measure employee compensation levels,” said Weand.
He said there had been fluxes in pay, such as in 2012 when the police department was down by 14 officers, and thus accrued large overtime costs.
Similarly, said Weand, 2014 saw “one of the worst winters on record” and overtime costs soared for the cost of removing snow and fixing multiple water main breaks.
Weand said that the finance staff in borough hall was tasked with working up scenarios for a typical manager, police officer and non-uniform civilian employee.
In the case of the manager, Weand said while Hylton’s analysis puts a manager’s increase at 50 percent over four years, using gross compensation puts the raise at 11.3 percent and the hourly increase “at a mere 4 percent.”
While Hylton showed a 40 percent increase for a police officer’s salary, using gross compensation shows an 14.8 percent increase; removing overtime reduces the increase to 11 percent, and the hourly rate is actually only a 10.4 percent increase over four years, said Weand.
For non-uniform employees, Hylton’s method shows a 37 percent hike, that is only 23 percent over four years when calculated using gross compensation, only 12.2 percent when overtime is removed, and a 6.3 percent in hourly rate, said Weand.
Hylton replied “Why would you ‘remove’ overtime” from the calculation? “Don’t taxpayers pay the cost of overtime? Of pensions? The bottom line is we still pay for all of it.”
He said what he wanted council to take away from his analysis is less about what any particular employee is paid, and more about the overall increased burden on the taxpayers over the past four years.
“What we the taxpayers paid for the employees is 33 percent higher over four years in which inflation has hardly increased,” Hylton insisted.
Weand said, “I don’t think (Hylton’s analysis) is fair and it gives the town a bad appearance by manipulating numbers.”
He concluded, “If you’re attacking the borough, or the finance department, you’re attacking me.”