The issue of pay raises for a select few was a sticking point for some Shawano County supervisors Wednesday.
The County Board approved a 5 percent pay raise for seven Highway Department workers by a 23-3 vote and an 8 percent raise for four Sheriff’s Department dispatchers 22-4 to bring them closer to veteran employees who are doing the same work but getting paid more.
Sheriff Randy Wright said $10,000 in training costs and four months of time are wasted when a trained dispatcher can go to another county and get paid several dollars more per hour more for the same work.
“It’s like a revolving door,” Wright said. “Not only that, we’ve got people leaving to go to a county next door to us and trying to poach our people from us.”
Wright said the raises would help retain dispatchers and reduce overtime costs.
Both departments said the 2014 budget, approved in October, would be sufficient to provide the raises.
The County Board, in the wake of Act 10, had enacted a policy two years ago that allowed employees to remain eligible for step increases, like they were when they were in a union, but any new hires from 2012 on were frozen at their starting rate until a wage study was done.
Two years later, the wage study still has not been completed. County Board Chairman Jerry Erdmann said a proposal will be discussed by the Administrative Committee on Dec. 1.
Supervisors were sympathetic, but felt it was better to get a wage study done first instead of cherry picking pay raises.
“I think we need to do this countywide, but I don’t think we can do it in a timely manner,” Supervisor Robert Krause said. “I’m not against this, but I think, administratively, we need to ask if this is a good way to do this.”
Administrative Coordinator Tom Madsen said granting raises for some employees and not others was bad for morale.
The county had originally proposed a 1 percent raise for all county employees, but reducing a $1.5 million deficit quashed that effort.
“I harbor no ill feelings for anybody wanting to get a raise, but all this is going to do is create a morale problem for the other employees,” Madsen said. “We’re going to have one department against another department, and that is not good county government.”
Supervisor Rick Giese said leaving the new employees at their starting rate for such a long time also hurts morale.
“You talk about one department against another department. Here, we’re trying to make a department whole,” Giese said, referring to the Highway Department. “These guys are out in limbo right now.”
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