Travis County Commssioners Court
February 4, 2003
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Item 10
10. Review and approve employee total compensation package for paycheck stuffer.
>> good morning, judge, commissioners, I'm alicia perez, executive manager for administrative operations. We have before you the request for an approval of an employee compensation statement and we have a sample for you. This would be for john l.doe, called employee compensation package. As you know, the salary that employees receive is only a portion, really, of -- of the cost of -- for employing a full-time employee. The county also adds retirement, social security, workers' compensation, medical insurance, medical insurance is paid for all employees by the county, we have the employee assistance program, provide 12 vacation days a year, provide 12 sick days a year. We have the designated holidays and personal holidays, which add up to a -- I believe 14 days, three personal holidays, then we have 11 of the legs designated holidays. We wanted to provide the employees with a full perspective of what the cost is to have a full-time employee. If you look at john l. Doe, his salary, which includes an annual salary and any additional pay, which could be longevity pay or bilingual pay or any of the other special pays that we have, his salary is 441,800 -- I'm sorry, 441,832, his total compensation -- 441,832, his total compensation package is 44,000, cost of benefits provided to each of the employees, that is about 41% of his total compensation package. And it's about 18,296. If you look on the back of the sample, it provides a pie chart for the employees, so that it puts a perspective what their salary is and what all of their benefits are in -- in terms of cost. If there is any additional pay components, they are also added in the box at the bottom under longevity pay. If they decline medical, we -- we pay them a portion of what we would pay for their medical costs. Certification pay. That includes a lot of other different sorts of special pay that we have in our policies and procedures, but -- I worked with several of the commissioners who requested we bring this to the court. We had done this back about '93, '94 I think, you know, '94 is when I had seen -- '95 was my first year that I had seen one of those. And then we stopped doing it. So you may be -- it may be a good idea to bring it back and have the employees appreciate the full cost of -- of paying for a full-time employee.
>> if we had the little chart at the bottom, do we need paragraph 3? The chart is the paragraph 3 in detail.
>> yeah.
>> right?
>> yes, sir, it is. It is.
>> I know that I'm -- I'm a little older than the average county employee, but the front in my view is a little smaller than desirable.
>> okay.
>> my recommendation would be to eliminate paragraph 3, enlarge the font.
>> font, sure.
>> and the other three paragraphs and also the chart.
>> okay. So the bottom line here is that if you think that your average salary is $40,000, if you get the additional pay in a second line, the county's investment is 62,000 plus.
>> yes, sir.
>> and this sets out the detail.
>> yes, sir. For each individual employee. And we have got a program -- we have it programed so that they will all receive their own statement.
>> it's all thanks to the taxpayers.
>> yes.
>> I think alicia and the folks in linda Moore smith's shop have done a really very good job capturing all of this. Sometimes people think of their compensation can with the county, yes, but what does my paycheck show. They just see the bottom line there, they don't really get a good reminder. I know that I would appreciate now getting the annual statements that we get from the retirement system, also kind of bringing me up to date as to what's going on. But also now the social security office is giving us an annual printout. It's really also the kind of -- to kind of reconfirm the numbers are all correct in making sure that -- that, you know, you fully understand that going in. I think that they have done a really nice job of capturing this in a way that's really easy for people to understand. Which is really what my goal was all about.
>> it's a real clear picture.
>> very clear picture for people. You have done a nice job.
>> would it help any for us to -- to delineate between -- between the benefits that are mandated? And those that the county on a discretionary level either enhance or provides? Kind of like I don't personal days are not required.
>> no, sir, they are not.
>> the eap is not.
>> designated county holidays, some of them are required, some of them we add to.
>> where we add to it, in my view it would be good to do that, I think.
>> there's an optional list of benefits that are provided.
>> we can do is that.
>> required to do the social security, medicare, retirement.
>> yes.
>> hopefully ones that we provide beyond the minimum required we do so to be competitive.
>> yes, sir.
>> good suggestion.
>> I think that if I were an employee that would matter to me.
>> judge, if we ever compare this alicia to other counties? [one moment please for change in captioners]
>> that's the only area that perhaps we offer an optional benefit. That other employers do not.
>> the 21%, the budget that pbo speaks of, are those percentages of salary that is -- that they calculate in a different line item for the budget.
>> you know, I don't know that we would find a whole lot of entities doing that here in central Texas, but I wonder what other counties are doing.
>> you know, some of the information I shared with you, we are above. And that's because it's the competitive nature of central Texas, law enforcement.
>> but I guess you could say that too. We don't have to do it. We've chosen to do it.
>> but the difference is between what you hear from pbo and budget value versus true value.
>> it didn't answer the question, though. When you say 20%, what's included? The other thing is if we compare this to other counties, which makes sense to me, we may and well go ahead and compare it to the university of Texas, lcra, city of Austin,, major employers in this area. My guess is that we are probably right there in the ballpark, but it would help to see.
>> this is really good perspective. I know when we go to new york we talked about the compensation package and we talked about what is the ad on for this next year and that really does put a lot of it in focus in terms of what we do for our employees, which they have always reminded us, is something they support.
>> I think we all are aware of -- when we make some decisions considering things like salaries and compensation packages, total of compensation packages, I think we do need to be very conscientious whenever we make that because before you know it, we have built ourselves a pretty large regime, if you will, like longevity pay. I mean, that's -- that's something that's pretty odd to me. You know, versus putting it on some sort of a system where you have gauges as to how you attain increased salary. And that usually goes along -- I'm more used to that being attached to either responsibilities or, you know, some sort of an effort so that people can see, okay, these people hit these benchmarks. I mean, everybody would love to say, you know, what if I just go and I stay at a job long enough, whether I take on any responsibilities, whether I hit certain benchmarks or whatever, those are -- that's a pretty sweet deal. A sweet deal for folks that work in whatever kind of an industry. And I think that we -- we've got to be careful with that because -- I understand that the pops is put in place, and if you're talking about racheting up three percent pay raises, over a 10-year period, you're talking about a 30% pay increase. At some point in time somebody is going to say we can't continue this because our revenues -- and we probably are about to find that we are in that period where the revenues are not going to be commensurate with what the outgo is.
>> I do believe that the court -- we have requested to come back to the court in March in a work session to talk about compensation or our three-year plan that we have, not only to do a market salary survey, but also to look at policies. At that time I think it would be an appropriate time to bring all the issues, the comparative analysis to where we are between the Travis County, university of Texas, city of Austin, and then dallas, tarrant, fort worth, the dallas, tarrant and harris and bare are the ones that -- bexar are the ones that we usually compare to.
>> I guess we need to see where we are. I think we shouldn't spend a whole lot of time on a three-year compensation plan in view of the economy unless we have a lot of conditions built in. I mean, we may want to give a whole lot of thought to how do we preserve -- [ laughter ] for the current employees. I do think we're stacked at a level that's probably just below what departments say they need, but what they're saying is we need this number of people to get the job done, which says to me that then you've got to focus on each employee benefit more productive. But thank god it will be a work session where we won't be asked to take action, but we will be asked to receive information and ask whatever questions we have, and if we need additional research, data collected, then we could ask for that too. Now, is my idea a good one about the third paragraph?
>> yes, sir, we can do that.
>> and the bigger font.
>> if we were to enlarge that font a little bit, that would be good information.
>> yeah.
>> and then the separation, judge, between what are mandated --
>> that would matter to me.
>> I think that's a good suggestion.
>> even if we just did an asterisks and for the note. I would check with pbo and find out what's in their 20%.
>> yes, sir, we can do that.
>> because when we start telling folks your benefit packages are 41 and a half percent, that's double the 20 percent that i've been using myself.
>> we'll do that. We'll get that information back to you via e-mail.
>> yeah. It's an easy thing to find out what u.t., Lcra, Austin, I guess from Texas association of counties, maybe cuc, what the other urban counties do so we figure out where we are compared to them. Okay. Anything further on this?
>> do we need to bring this back, judge, or would you take a motion to approve with the changes that we've noted?
>> i'd say make those changes and run with it?
>> okay.
>> any objection to that?
>> no.
>> any more discussion? All in favor? That passes by unanimous vote. Thank y'all very much.
Last Modified: Wednesday, April 2, 2003 10:25 AM