Four of the newer dispatchers at the Shawano County Sheriff’s Department might be paid nearly as much as their veteran counterparts next year.
The Public Safety Committee voted 3-1 earlier this week to increase the dispatchers’ wages from $16.72 per hour — the starting pay for dispatchers — to $19.79 per hour, equating to an almost $6,000 annual increase before taxes. The County Board will need to approve the raises as part of the 2014 budget before they are official.
Top dispatchers are expected to make $20.19 an hour in 2014 if their pay increase is approved in the budget.
Maria McCoy, dispatch supervisor, requested that the committee increase their pay by $2,500 annually, or $1.28 per hour. Supervisors, however, went with the higher increase, saying it would be better to have all dispatchers closer in pay since they are doing the same job.
McCoy said, without the raises, she was concerned the new dispatchers would leave Shawano County, which has invested about $11,000 per dispatcher for training, for better pay elsewhere. The four new dispatchers have all started working for the county within the last year.
The proposed increase “still puts them below the top scale, but hopefully that’ll cure the nature of the beast to be trained here and go to greener pastures,” McCoy said.
Sheriff Randy Wright said the Sheriff’s Department experienced similar problems in 1976.
“From 1976 to 1977, we were a stepping stone — we were a giant stepping stone,” Wright said. “They get their experience, get a little under the belt and move on.”
Wright said the issue also affects clerical staff and other employees. He said Act 10, which limited the bargaining rights of most public employee unions, passed by the state Legislature in 2011 was at least partially to blame for the situation.
“I know the talk is going to be, where are we going to come up with the money?” Wright said. “You ignore something for a while, it’s going to fall apart. You keep working at it piece by piece, it may not hurt all at once.”
The money for the dispatchers’ increase is expected to come out of the department’s overtime budget. If the department can avoid losing dispatchers, it won’t need to pay overtime to the remaining dispatchers during new employee recruiting and training, McCoy noted. She also pointed out that after a dispatcher passes the required exam, it takes an additional four months of training before the dispatcher can work solo.
Supervisor Bert Huntington suggested looking at increasing the starting wage for dispatchers and other Sheriff’s Department staff to be more competitive and curb turnover.
“The problem is, no matter what happens here today and what we decide, we’re really going to make 345 other employees (across the county) mad,” Huntington said.
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