Study: Pay scale in public works needs changes
Research shows pay at city agency not on pace with cities similar in size
An official with a company charged with performing an evaluation for the city’s public works department reported to the Forrest City City Council’s Personnel Policy Committee Tuesday that the pay scale for employees in that department needs to be adjusted.
Committee members Personnel Committee heard a report regarding the city's public works department's job valuation, market pay and compensation study from Bruce Johanson, with the Johanson Group of Fayetteville.
According to Johanson, 42 of the city’s 55 public works positions are being paid a lower rate than cities with populations in the 10,000 to 20,000 range and similar to Forrest City.
In 2019, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated Forrest City's population at 13,820. The city’s population includes inmates housed at the Federal Correctional Complex.
"We start the process by going through all of the jobs and creating a job description. Then we go through what we call a 15factor job valuation for each position," said Johanson.
He explained the company uses the same process with all of its clients in order to create a system to be able to assign a numeric value to each position. “That way, we are using consistent factors to measure the jobs," he said.
The company uses the current pay for each position and charts it along that numeric value to create a visual line graph of pay-to-position value.
"This gives us the ability to measure both the internal value and the internal pay structure for each position," said Johanson.
Johanson said the information is then placed into Market Pay comparison surveys for five areas including cities comparable to Forrest City in Arkansas, the East Arkansas area, Department of Labor, Arkansas Compensation Association, Companalyst and Arkansas Compdata.
"This geographically gives us an idea of what we look like," said Johanson, explaining that the city is 23.3% behind Arkansas cities with a 10,000 to 20,000 population range, 28.7% behind the Department of Labor data, 28.9% behind Companalyst data, 29.7% behind the Arkansas Compensation Association and 28.1% behind Arkansas Compdata.
"Again, the average being 27.76% behind market," Johanson told the committee.
Johanson said the company uses the data to create a payversus-pay-grade range to see how many of the positions are being paid under the minimum pay range to over the maximum pay range.
The committee was shown exhibits for each position, the number of employees in each position, as well as the minimum, midpoint and max pay policy pay range per the collected data from the surveys.
Johanson's group marked each position within a sixbracket range in that data to show that 42 of the positions fall in the under-minimum pay scale, 10 fall in the first/minimum bracket, and three fall into the second bracket. None of the current positions are being paid in the third/midpoint bracket, fourth bracket or over maximum bracket, according to Johanson's presentation.
Johanson further said it would take a 7% adjustment of the total base department salaries to move the current
(Continued from Page 1) employees under minimum to minimum and then another 3% to move employees in the ranges up some.
"We are recommending a 10% budget increase per year for the next four years which would eliminate the 28% deficit plus salary movements over the next three to four years," Johanson said in the paperwork provided to the committee.
Johanson said the increase would not occur overnight, but encouraged the committee to begin considering areas in the budget that could be cut to make up the deficit in the public works department.
"A lot of cities like to be around that midpoint average. That way, they don't have to be concerned about losing people to competitive pay," said Johanson.
"Your evaluation was based on the population of Forrest City based on the population of other cities correct?" asked councilman Danny Capps.
"Yes we used the 10,000 to 20,000 population range," said Johanson, explaining that the Arkansas Municipal League divides cities into different population ranges and the company used one of those population ranges for its study.
Capps also asked if the Federal Prison population would factor differently for the data.
Johanson said it would depend on the structures for positions compared to the public works department.
Councilman Chris Oswalt encouraged committee members to read over the public works job descriptions the
Johanson Group provided as well.
"Glynis (Lynch) has those job descriptions in her office," said Oswalt. "To make everything useful from this company, Mayor, if you could let the other members of the council know that she has those in her office to read, that way once everybody has had an opportunity to read, the council can make a decision on whether or not to accept those as the new job descriptions."
Forrest City Mayor Cedric Williams agreed and said data would be available to those who want to review it and said there would be many more conversations around the study before the council makes a final decision.