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Marietta City Council discussed possible ways to save money in regards to employee pay Tuesday night.
During a joint employee relations and finance committees meeting, Employee Relations Committee Chair and At-Large Councilwoman Cassidi Shoaf started a discussion about the city's longevity pay and step raise policies.
According to Marietta's codified ordinances, employees receive longevity pay that is a percentage of their gross pay and the amounts vary based on years of service, ranging from 1% at the low end for five years of service and 6% at the high end for 23 years of service.
Longevity pay starts once someone has been working for the city full time for five years. This policy does not include elected officials, police and fire department personnel whose longevity pay is governed by a different section of the codified ordinance and employees governed by a collective bargaining agreement.
According to Shoaf, right now employees get a raise once a year every year for the first five years they work for the city and it is called a step raise. Shoaf mentioned during the meeting maybe switching to pay ranges for employees that have a minimum and maximum amount and an employee's pay would fall within that range. Any raises in the range would be based on performance and performance evaluations would be used.
Shoaf told the Times ideally she would like to see all raises be performance based raises as a way to produce a productive workforce.
Shoaf told the Times after the meeting that she wants to change the way the city handles longevity pay and step raises "to try to get a better handle on finances" which could save the city money.
Shoaf suggested during the meeting that the city could maybe switch longevity pay to a lump sum payment or if they can't do that possibly switching it being based on gross pay to being based on net pay. She said these switches would keep the longevity pay from rising as exponentially as it does now.
Shoaf said she would like to get plans in place for pay ranges with performance based raises before the city starts doing performance evaluations. She asked Mayor Joshua Schlicher his thoughts on instituting performance evaluations for city employees.
"If we want to do that, yeah," Schlciher said about performance evaluations.
Schlicher said the city had been talking about starting performance evaluations three years ago.
City Law Director Paul Bertram told Shoaf and other meeting attendees that he would have to check to see if they can make changes for existing employees and what changes they can make for new employees.
During the meeting Marietta Code Enforcement Officer Wayne Rinehart brought up a concern he had about the city switching existing employees to salary ranges with performance based raises.
"How can you take what pay packages someone's been hired under knowing they've got steps and then say 'well let me take all that away, we're gonna change,'" he said.
Shoaf answered Rinehart by saying the city is seeing if that's possible to do for existing employees.
Shoaf asked near the end of the meeting if anybody had any other thoughts or questions about the longevity pay or step raises.
At Large Councilman Ben Rutherford said in response "so in other words we're looking to try to institute a structure that allows us to incentivize meritorious work and we currently don't have that."
Shoaf told Rutherford that is "correct."
After the meeting Shoaf said changing the longevity pay and switching to pay ranges with performance based raises is a way for the city to save money without cutting staff and if the city can only make changes for new employees it won't give the city cost savings in the short term but it would save them money in the future, after the meeting.
No legislation was mentioned during the meeting nor did Shoaf or any other council member mention introducing legislation or a date by which they would like to submit legislation concerning longevity and step raises.