As part of a continuing effort to keep county employees in place, the Lowndes County Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to give “longevity pay” to hourly employees at five-year intervals.
Lowndes County Administrator Jay Fisher said the county previously offered pay raises to employees who stuck with the county.
“We don’t have a mechanism to incentivize our longer-term employees other than annual raises,” he said. “Evidently this has been part of the county in the past, and at some point nobody can pinpoint, it just kind of went away.”
Fisher said workers will get a 25-cent-per-hour raise after being with the county for five years, 50 cents at 10 years of service and 75 cents at 15 years of service.
“If you hit all those milestones you would be getting an extra $1.50 per hour,” Fisher said.
He recommended the raise go into effect Feb. 1 and said it bore an estimated startup cost of $130,000.
“That cost is larger because we are implementing it all in one year so we can hit everybody,” Fisher said. “That $130,000 will pay for the rest of this year.”
In subsequent years, he estimated the program would cost about $30,000 per year.
The money needed for the raises is already in the budget, he said, due to understaffing at county offices.
“Any time you have an employee who leaves, you have a period where that position sits open or is not filled at all,” he said. “… Certainly we have a lot of positions with high turnover and open positions that are sitting open. We quantified that, and it is roughly 7 percent of our positions.”
Those openings create about $400,000 a year in budgeted payroll that isn’t used, he said, which is more than enough to pay for the raises.
“You don’t need a budget amendment to fund this,” he said. “We already have the funds available.”
Going forward, the years-of-service raise will be given on Oct. 1, which is the first day of the new fiscal year, Fisher said.
Fisher said there were about 285 hourly employees, but only about 130 had been with the county for five years or more.
“We’re not talking about a huge number,” he said.
District 5 Supervisor Leroy Brooks moved to approve the raises, with a second by District 1 Supervisor Harry Sanders.
Sanders, however, immediately took issue with how the raises were brought up, arguing that he did not have enough time to review the figures Fisher provided. He also felt the raises might cause morale problems.
“You’ve got one guy who’s a truck driver and he’s making a certain amount of money, and then all of a sudden you’ve got a guy making $1.50 more an hour and doing the same job,” he said.
Brooks disagreed.
“We talked about this during the (budget process),” he said. “This is not the first time it’s come to the board.”
Brooks said the county needs to preserve experience.
“A guy develops a level of maturity and strength in what he does, and we see this,” Brooks said. “Not everybody handles a trash truck with the same caliber of work. … While we can afford it, we need to do everything we can.”
Sanders moved to table the issue, but his motion died without a second.
“If one guy’s been digging a ditch for five years, and another for 20, I don’t know why they wouldn’t be paid the same thing to do the same job,” he said.
District 4 Supervisor Jeff Smith said the raises weren’t about a specific skill set but were for years of service.
“We have lost quality people over the years, and the way we’re trying to retain some of them is giving incentives,” he said. “We’re trying to be separate from other counties and pay our quality people because we lose them every day. This is a way to get a person to reconsider whether they want to go somewhere else.”
The raises were approved unanimously.
Brian Jones is the local government reporter for Columbus and Lowndes County.
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