Travis County Commissioners Court
July 11, 2006
Item 7
[one moment, please, for change in captioners]
>> …Commissioner Davis , judge Biscoe - this is base on the model that I worked up that we have.
>> this is based on the model that I worked up that we have used for several years that indicates the sheriff is a little underpaid given the population of the county, but this amount that we suggested. For the other offices, we recommend that they receive any across the board raise that all elected officials might receive but nothing else. A couple of notes on this. The treasurer is a really tough one to look at because not all of the counties in our sample have a county treasurer. So I'm dealing with maybe 15 sample size instead of 25. That tends to make the model less reliable. So we had to do fallbacks like how many full-time employees. As for justice of the peace and con stabels, they are already making, as you can see in the report, significantly more than the model would predict. It's our understanding that the Commissioner's court has asked us to revisit all county offices beginning in the fall when we have a lot more time to collect more data and more types of data data. You know, doing this on a hurry- hurry-up basis, called in late April and starting in June, we don't really have time the look at everything we would like to look at to come up with a good estimate. These recommendations, by the way, are based on the job, the office, not the individual who fills that office. Like in the case of justice of the peace, we have very highly qualified people, more highly than most counties, because they are all members of the bar. But factoring that in as part of their pay, we felt like was looking at the office we had to go according to statutory requirements for the office, which are different than what we have. And then if the Commissioner's court want to a premium on that to encourage better qualified candidates, that's a policy decision that's in your hands. So, are there any questions?
>> did the analysis, those, include a comparison of salaries for our elected officials, salaries for comparable official officials in other counties?
>> yes.
>> jp's here compared to in larger and smaller?
>> what I do, I take a sample. This year we were able to get the data from 25 counties. And I do a process known as ordinary least squares regression, a statistical analysis. I put the numbers in. In this case we looked at, or the significant variable was a population variable. Some of the other things like new home price, which we had used to try to capture cost of living, turn out to be statistic statistically not significant. Now, we're looking at trying to come up with a different housing cost variable for use in the futurefuture, because some of the smaller counties may only have three new home permits issu issued all year, and you can get a lot of bias in there, a lot of sample bias. So we're looking for something better. Anyway, I used this population variable and basically it fits a relationship that relates as closely as possible to a straight line. The population variable as the independent or explanatory variable, and in the salary for that county as the dependent variable. So it sets up a relationship that I think at the back you have my report that I sent to the committee. So like for county sheriff, we have salary equals this constant which is a very large negative number. That's just an artifact of the regression process, you know, and it would take me about three hours to explain the math behind this. If any of you just can't live without knowing it, I'll be happy to send you all the revenues you need. Plus this other large variable times the natural log of the population. And I had to use natural log to get a straight line relationship instead of a curved relationship which is bad news. If you true--try to use this. Tees numbers come out of the analysis of the actual data of the other 25 counties. I extrude Travis County from this part of the analysis. And once I have these regression parameters estimated, I take the value for Travis County, plug it into that equation, turn and crank and out pops a predicted value. I would point out these predicted values, we can't let them do our thinking for us. I know the committee got tired of hearing me say that, but that gets us a starting point, a baseline. Then we say, okay, is there any reason to deviate from this prediction, up or down. If we find a good reason, we'll deviate. If we can't find a good substantive objecttive reason, then we will go with this and say this is our prediction.
>> doctor, what I thought, what I was expecting to see on the jp section, I didn't see there. And that is that I thought that this court two years ago, made a policy decision related to our justices of the peace. The question was whether we would consider them to be a part of the judicial pay scale or not not. And that the difference between the numbers were quite astounding. We kind of got halfway there and didn't do the second half last year. But we start fresh and anew. The reality is that we've got district judges who are being paid approximately 133,000, county court at 132, the associate judges are pegged at 7 75 percent of a district judge's salary, and while jp's are not doing felony and misdemeanor cases like an associate judge would do, what an associate judge does not have to do is run an office, manage employees, and be personally responsible for millions of dollars in mandates from the state government and new mandates are coming, and dealing with the facts computer system and serving on all sorts of committees. So I don't see any discussion of the jp's in relation to them being part of a judicial family, which think, susan, if I'm not correct, the discussion of the salaris for our district and county court of law judges will indeed be coming back because of the new ruling out of the appeals court as to what the language in the legislation match in terms of what their caps are. So i.
>> I was kind of puzzled.
>> I was puzzled.
>> seems to be we're going back to formula thing and looking at at--
>> that is the committee as responsibility to do that.
>> I was surprised that we didn't get a letter.
>> to ignore all that.
>> to go back to the old way.
>> yeah.
>> it's weighing everybody in comparison to other peer counties, which is fine. But on this one, I thought we had already said.
>> yeah.
>> we're going towards the idea of a judicial pay scale, and where we find they ought to be.
>> right.
>> well, if I may answer that. That, the committee felt going towards the judicial pay scale, was a policy decision that was better left in the hands of the Commissioners court rather than the committee take over on that.
>> yeah.
>> so we can tell you, this is what they are gettinggetting in other counties. And certainly, if the commission Commissioner's court wants as a matter of policy to ignore this, these numbers, and move them to kind of a judicial stepping stone, that is certainly within your power, and we felt like that was better left as a decision for the Commissioner's court rather than for the committee to weigh in on that one way or the other.
>> that's why I expected that paragraph to be kind of written up as, listen, if you want to make this a policy thing, go forth and do good work. However, if you want to choose to do this in terms of in relation to peer counties, here is what we found and therefore we don't think, we think that they are very much in line with what they ought to be getting, et cetera. I didn't see it written that way and so I just want to, I'm going to put my voice out there that I intend to bring this back up when we get to setting up their salaries.
>> we can write it in ourselves.
>> yeah.
>> we can add the matter to the boilerplate.
>> I want to be sure and wan the jp's to know that that is not an issue that is settled with this report it's just a platform for further discussion, which I'll do.
>> these are recommendations from the committee.
>> exactly.
>> and they are just advisory.
>> uh-huhand also, if the Commissioner's court does have, you know, the policy of having the jp's on the judicial pay scale, then this committee won't have to look at their salaries in the future.
>> right.
>> it's one less office to look at.
>> uh-huh.
>> anything else today, doctor?
>> no, that's all. I'd just like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to serve Travis County and the rest of us.
>> thank you so much.
>> you have been on the committee how many years now?
>> every year, four of the last six [a-b] the committee has met for the last six.
>> thank you very much.
>> we know you have been getting the big paycheck every month.
>> yeah, I wish.
>> we appreciate your help in the assistance of the other committee members and also county staff.
>> thank in terms of a schedule, what did you all have in mind?
>> what we had was going through the next couple of Tuesdays so you could hear from, I know that the county auditor has on the judicial side the new attorney general's opinion. I believe I saw an agenda item that you will have on for the 18 18th for next week that. Will give you time to review that also. And then also if any of the elected officials want to come in and talk to you about either the committee recommendations or what pbo is proposing and we put together a little spreadsheet that shows the salary increases would be in the total budget cost for two percent, two and a half percent and three percent across the board increases. So if we go that route, two more weeks, on July 25, we would ask the court to go ahead and propose the salaries that they want to set so that they can advertise it in the Austin chronicle. Then Thursday next after that it would appear, the ad would appear in the chronicle.
>> you want us to put this on the agenda on July 25 or the 18 18th?
>> on both. The 18th there's already another agenda item on the judge's salaries. But I think it might be a good idea just to have it on in case, you know, there's anybody that wants any kind of input. Then on the 25th for sure we need it on. The 18th is up to you.
>> is the 18th going to be broad enough that when we talk about the judicial salaries in the court and district that it can be a broad enough discussion so that we may legally talk about the justices of the peace?
>> the justices of the peace are included in that one on the request to text.
>> thank you.
>> anything else today?
>> no. And just the rest of the salary setting calendar in your bacup and if you have any questions, just let us know.
>> thank you very much. Appreciate it.
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Last Modified:
Wednesday, July 12, 2006 10:47 AM