Apr. 30—Faced with the prospect that Joplin's city government could be looking at a more severe labor shortage that could result in cuts to more services, the City Council has been asked to implement a new employee classification system and pay plan.
The council has not moved forward with the plan twice, but it is now proposed for action at the council's meeting Monday. It is on the agenda as an emergency ordinance. That means that it would go into effect immediately if approved.
What has slowed adoption of the system, called an internal equity plan, is the pay scale compared to the more common use of market-drive pay rates and council concerns about it leaving out police and firefighters, who recently obtained double digit raises through union negotiations.
As a result, though council members have said they intend to bring competitive wages to the table in the effort to retain existing personnel and fill open positions, several had not been ready to approve the plan.
At a work session April 10, the city manager discussed the history of employee pay, detailed the internal equity plan, and said tax and fee sources could be used to pay for raises.
The raises to pay for police could mean an average increase of $10,000 a year. For general employees, the average adjustment would be more than $6,000.
"For some employees, it could mean a few hundred dollars in increase, and for those further away from the minimum pay, it could be thousands of dollars in increase," City Manager Nick Edwards said.
Recent pay increases for police officers that included a 9% across-the-board wage increase for all city employees in 2020 and a raise of 11.7% late last year after a collective bargaining contract was agreed upon seems to be lessening the shortage of officers, Edwards said. There were 20 openings in the department last summer, and that is now to down to nine.
A raise of 11.2% for firefighters after collective bargaining talks early this year resulted in a pact has increased new job applicants. With the department now filling the ranks for a seventh fire station that will open later this year, there were about 100 applications submitted, the city manager said.
On the general employee side, where the city manager contends pay still lags other similar sized cities, hiring and retaining is on a downward trend.
The city is having a difficult time in the Joplin Health Department recruiting workers for the Women, Infant, Children nutrition program. The city is short a whole street crew to do repairs, the city manager said. And little more than a month away from opening city swimming pools, there has not been enough applicants yet to do that.
Out of more than 500 positions, there are 100-plus positions open.
"Approving (the plan) won't mean that further reductions won't happen, but it could help," Edwards told the council April 10.
But the council did not give the plan the green light.
Not all employees would get thousands of dollars or even hundreds, Edwards was told.
Councilwoman Kate Spencer voiced concerns about some employees receiving a small raise while others would get much more.
"I don't feel overly good about it, but I know the employees need raises," she said.
Councilman Phil Stinnett said he was concerned that revenue would not cover the wage commitments in the future.
Councilman Mark Farnum said he would like to see the plan weighted to police and fire, "not because I don't have a great deal of faith in other city employees, but because police and fire are a base, the foundation" for city services.
At a work session held last Monday, there was still reluctance to move forward.
Stinnett said at that discussion that he thought there was to be market study done before the internal equity plan was to be adopted. He also said the council's appointed finance committee was to come forward with a recommendation for a long-term source to pay for increased wages under a new plan.
While the committee has not formed a recommendation yet, the internal equity plan was the topic of committee discussion at a meeting Tuesday.
Committee Chairman Russ Alcorn asked the city manager Tuesday if there should have been a market study this time and what he thought the results of that study would have been.
The city's most recent market study in 2020-2021 caused city officials to provide the 9% across-the-board wage increases to all employees because the city manager said all wages, not just those of public safety workers, were lagging.
In that study, police and fire pay rates were obtained for the local area that included Carthage, Neosho, Pittsburg and Jasper County. The council set a goal of being at 110% of the local comparisons and at least 80% regionally.
The regional study for police and fire pay involved the cities of Bentonville, Branson, Jefferson City, Liberty, Springfield, St. Joseph and Fort Smith. The last study showed them at 110% of the local comparisons and 83% regionally.
Alcorn asked the city manager if the city made progress on those percentages after raises were given to police and fire as the result of collective bargaining completed late last year and early this year. That effort resulted in contracts for pay increases averaging about 11% plus annual raises of 3% for the next four years.
The city manager said he did not know what those percentages would be now.
"It could have been a wash," Edwards said, because increases given by other cities the last two years to respond to inflation ranged as high as 7% to 8% over two to three years. Joplin's general employees received a 4% cost-of-living raise late last year because of inflation.
"This rapid inflation has allowed cities to make some pretty big wage changes," Edwards said.
"It would be nice to see a new study," Alcorn said.
Only three of the 13 members of the finance committee said they had worked for an employer that used an internal equity plan for providing compensation. Two committee members said their experiences involved only components of internal equity as part of a pay plan.
