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July 17, 2010

County approves step and grade pay system

Nathan Straus Jacksonville Daily Progress

RUSK — The Cherokee County Commissioners’ Court approved a new pay system for county employees during a special court meeting Friday morning.

This new system, the Step and Grade Program, will go into effect pending approval of the county budget in early October, said County Judge Chris Davis.

“The system we had was broken,” Davis said. “It was not working.”

Davis said in the new program there are 64 pay grades, each with 16 steps to each.

“Each step is a 3 percent pay increase. If we said two years from now we’d give one step raises, everyone would move up three percent,” Davis said. “There’s going to be some freedom within the department, but each department will have to come to Commissioners Court and get approval (for pay raises).”

Precinct 2 Commissioner Kevin Pierce voted against the program.

“I think this going to be the most detrimental thing for the county,” Pierce said.

Pierce told the other commissioners he spoke with officials from counties which approved the Step and Grade Program and learned the program “caused confusion, problems and animosity between employees”.

He also said under the new program, at least two county employees with more than 20 years of experience will receive less pay and smaller raises than county employees with less than 10 years of experience, though he did not specify which positions these employees were in.

Precinct 3 Commissioner Katherine Pinotti noted under the new system the county’s first assistant auditor will make more than the internal auditor, which has higher requirements.

Davis said the program will remove some individuality and jealousy within the county’s ranks to make pay more equitable.

“We will try to get the job positions in and take people’s names out,” Davis added.

Precinct 4 Commissioner Byron Underwood said in the event of a new hire, the new employee would not be able to be paid more than two “steps” below the person who previously held the position.

“He can’t be put in at what that guy was making,” Underwood said.

Pierce said this will lead to the county not being able to pay a hard worker for the quality of the work performed.

Davis said the program is a work in progress and will require fine tuning after being put into effect.

He added objectives of the program will be to assist employees and applicants in understanding each job and relationships among the jobs and group jobs into groups which require employees to have similar skills, effort and responsibility.

Other objectives include providing an organized system of pay groups and steps used to assure equity across departmental lines and reward employees for exceptional performance, as well as establishing policies and procedures for implementing and administering the plan in the future.

“I originally thought this was not what I wanted to do,” Davis said, “but I later realized it was good for the county.”

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