May 11—MARIETTA — Cobb County's roughly 5,000 employees say they're largely happy with the health benefits, time off, and training opportunities they receive on the public payroll.
It's the payroll, an outside study engaged by the county has found, that's the rub.
Nancy Berkley of Florida-based Evergreen Consulting told county commissioners Tuesday that workers feel the county's compensation isn't up to snuff, and Evergreen says it has the numbers to prove it.
County employees are making, on average, about 13% than the market "midpoint" — the median pay rate for a given position — relative to other jurisdictions. Looking at it another way, nearly 70% of full-time workers are below that midpoint figure.
Evergreen compared salaries for 149 positions with those at local governments around metro Atlanta to arrive at those figures, including Smyrna, Kennesaw, Johns Creek, and several neighboring counties. It also looked at Miami-Dade County and Duval County in Florida, Davidson County (Nashville) in Tennessee, and Mecklenburg County (Charlotte) in North Carolina, among others, incorporating cost of living adjustments.
Evergreen has conducted similar studies for the cities of Powder Springs and Marietta within the last year.
The firm was retained by the county last fall to the tune of $128,000, and County Manager Jackie McMorris said it had given Evergreen a few parameters from the start. First, department heads aimed for employee pay to be at the 70th percentile in the salary market (the "midpoint" represents the 50th percentile).
Second, Chairwoman Lisa Cupid wanted to see the base pay for workers start at $15 per hour. That consequently raises salaries up the ladder as the county looks to avoid pay compression, when new hires end up taking home close to what long-tenured employees make.
(Cupid would later question whether the $15 per hour floor was sufficient, saying, "When we first started looking at this, that seemed reasonable, but now it doesn't today. These minimums are going up.")
The impetus for the study came from what staff have described as rapidly mounting problems with recruitment and retention. The county's turnover rate in 2020 was 9%, and was 13% for employees on its less generous "hybrid" pension plan.
"They come, they stay, at most, maybe five years, and they leave. So that group of employees is really struggling to find a reason to be loyal to Cobb," McMorris said.
The pension plan is another headache for workers, Evergreen found. McMorris said where the county is "lacking the most is in employees' inability to level up their investment." In other words, they don't have enough take-home pay to put what they'd like into their pensions.