Travis County Commissioners Court
March 27, 2007
Item 40
Due to technical difficulties some caption files may be incomplete.
40 is to consider and take appropriate action on compensation and equity issues that affect county offices including the tax assessor collector and county clerk.
>> good afternoon. I'm dana debeauvoir, Travis County clerk.
>> nelda speashz, Travis County tax assessor.
>> and we are here to talk to you about the issue of compression as it relates to past actions of the court and the actions that we hope you will take for the future. And judge, you were working late last night. Thank you for trying to call me back. I was at the lege, so I appreciate that. All right. What we're going to do is we're going to get started with a slide show that we're going to rip right through here, but it's going to show you facts and figures and statistics. We have been -- nelda and I have been workogthis issue now for several months with hrmd and pbo to try to come up with some kind of a solution. And we're here today because we can't do it alone. We're going to have to have your help to solve it. And we'll be up here in just a minute....
>> ...compensation issues, but specifically what we want to talk to you about is compression. We want to talk about why this is such a big problem. We want to talk about the problems that I think we're having with retention, hiring, training and keeping qualified, trained employees. What this has already done to our operations. And we have stories that we're going to quickly tell you about that. And then we are bringing to you a religious for how we think we can solve it. First question we need an answer for you is that -- let you know about is it is a big problem. But you are looking between the tax office and the county clerk's office and we have also spoken with the direct clerk, but when you're looking at us, we are the problem. This isn't a big problem elsewhere in county government. We're the lion's share of where your administrative family and the ones that are having a problem are located. And so we're hoping that because we've been able to identify the problem, shrink it down as much as we can and come up to you with a proposal, we're hoping that we can move forward with a solution. Part of the reason why it's so big is because this compression issue affects every single one of our employees, and that's the bulk of who our folks are working. We've got 89 county clerk employees who are affected by this, 117 tax office employees who are affected by this. It's a lot of folks, but once again we're sitting here and we're the problem. The 89 employees that you saw represent 70% of the clerk's office administrative work group, 70% of our employees, and 94% of the tax office employees. You're going to see statistics in a little bit that show that only 22 of the people in the county clerk's office in fact qualified under green circles. So you can see if you've only just done a little bit, that's part of the reason why we have a number of people involved in this. There are also a couple other comments that I would like to make. We are not talking about your most expensive employees in county government. In fact, to the contrary, we are talking about a population of people whose average salary is $31,000. These are not our top level. These are, however, our boots on the ground. These are the people that go out everyday, starting at 8:00 in the morning, greeting customers, taking care of business, doing processing work and basically collecting the revenue and reporting it to the treasury. And of course we're your revenue centers as well. The maximum range that we're talking about today for salary sz between 29,000 and approximately 39,000. So we recognize that other place plaises in county government have places that make a higher average salary than this. We are not that group. Part of the reason why we ended up having a rather large chunk of people and money involved in this is because there was a five-year delay in doing any kind of market assessment on how competitive these positions were. Unfortunately at the same time that we were having that five-year wait, while county government was busy workogother projects, I might add, that unfortunately at the same time the technology also changed dra masticly for this particular group. Now in order to be able to serve in these jobs, whether you're working in county government, elsewhere in the private sector or elsewhere you have to have mostly a degree or you have to have years of experience and specific kinds of computer programs in order to know how to do the jobs we're asking our people to do. So we had new technology and then of course we're always in a competitive position with trying to gain administrative experience. We've got a chart up here that shows you in the tax office what that market assessment did for us. What it showed is that people who were in a particular level job should have been at a -- for the most part three to five levels higher in order to be -- remain competitive in the market. And it slipped more than one or two levels, which is pretty normal when you're doing a market assessment. It slipped this much because we took five years to address the issue. And you can see what the positions are that are affected in the tax office. The lion's share went up two grade or more and in our office they went up three grades or more.
>> they went up based on the market salary survey?
>> yes. The value of the position that the person -- these people are hald holding relative to the market someplace shifted upwards approximately three level or more. And that was because it was a five-year delay. Had we caught it at the two or three year interval, it wouldn't have been that big a jump, but it is and there have you it. And you can see the number of employees that are involved. Okay. Now, what this really means is that the people who have been working for county government for a few years and are top performers, people who would qualify for performance-based pay, are the ones that are not recognized in our previous attempts to try to adjust compensation issues. So ironically the ones that we're trying to keep, the ones that represent the nuts and bolts of delivering county services to the public are exactly the kind of people that we're trying to address today. The next slide shows you the impact of having limited ability to be able to compete in the marketplace for people with the skills we need for administrative jobs. What this does is it shows you how many people have been in a particular slot based on a job description since 2002, since the last time we were evaluated, and how many months it took me to fill that job. Now, can you see that we worked pretty quickly. There's not much more than about a 60 day delay between the time when somebody leaves and the time when the next person takes over. So that is about as quick as you can turn around a job opening. There are instances, though, where we were not able to turn it around that quickly and I want to just briefly say that what we ended up being forced into was we would interview a group of qualified applicants, offer the job to the top person that we really wanted to come to work for county government, and that person when they found out that there was no salary negotiation, that there was no really ability to do recruitment on the basis of matching their skills and education to what the marketplace would pay, turn us down? We would go through first choice, second choice, third choice, all the way down to fourth choice to find a person who was willing to accept the job and then in one of these positions, it was the court clerk ii position, which for me is one of the highest levels that you can have in this family, that fourth level applicant that we were happy to get quit after two weeks and went to find a better job, and there we were back in the mix again. So we want you to understand that this is quantifiable and we know exactly how it's hurting us and these are the hours and the dollars that affect us. We've also been in the position of not -- we have to use overtime because when you've got this in and out, people constantly turning over and having vacancies, you don't have enough people, enough bodies on hand to be able to keep up with the volume. And the one thing that really separates the tax office and the county clerk as far as interesting, unique offices, is that we are extremely high volume. That's part and parcel of our jobs. We have had to spend overtime money, temporary overtime money to keep up with those back logs and we still try to carry just enough of a backlog so that we're still meeting the public's need, bow breaking the budget to go in and fix it wholesale. So we have been using overtime money to try to fill in the gaps caused by the problem that for us is growing.
>> what's the source of the overtime money?
>> general fund.
>> salary savings?
>> no. Overtime budgeted.
>> budgeted line item? Overtime?
>> yes, sir.
>> and how much is in that today?
>> let me ask...
>> ...i'm thinking elections.
>> salary savings.
>> we pool our salary savings, so the $75,000 that we spent on salary savings last year, $75,000 for overtime was pulled from salary savings. And we've exhausted it.
>> what's the attrition rate for this group of employees?
>> once we get them, and assuming this compression problem doesn't continue, especially in the courts area, this is where we've had our longest serving employees, the ones -- once they get trained for the job and get comfortable in the job, they tend to stay and be very good employees. So for the most part we're in a transition right now. I don't think I can answer your question specifically because what we're trying to do is avoid getting worse. We want to keep people who we've already invested in for training and expertise.
>> additional questions I have I can send to you in writing?
>> absolutely.
>> we talked with the sheriff's office about this issues almost every year, so questions are on the tip of my tongue.
>> you're accustomed to this. And we were surprised at how intractable the problem is at least from our perspective and being able to solve it. So that one is fine. What we were able to do in county government before is we had a salary ladder, and depending on if you came to us with a degree and with years of judicial experience or years of computer experience, you could be hired up to midpoint, up positive midpoint, at a level commensurate with your education and experience. So people who were brand new in their careers and didn't have a lot of experience saw a difference in their pay as compared to folks who came in with good, solid education credentials and experience. And that practice that we had used in the past of bringing people in commensurate within a rage, commensurate with their experience and skim saved us from having compression issues in all these years in the past. So up until we reached this time period, we had taken action to minimize the problem that we're seeing now. And we offer that to you as an example of how standard hiring practices in the private sector also apply to us and then when we're not able to offer that it puts nus a position not competitive with the marketplace.
>> so if jane doe leaves the county clerk's office after 10 years, she is at a clerk -- she is at a alary for a clerk with 10 year's experience.
>> yes, sir.
>> that money is in your budget?
>> if the court gave any cost of living, that would have been included in her salary.
>> whatever salary she was get getting is in your budget?
>> absolutely.
>> so when you post that job you post a range.
>> right.
>> now, I don't know that we have ever man be paid.
>> right.
>> what we said is don't exceed midpoint.
>> precisely.
>> unless there's justification.
>> yes.
>> now, we have approved several where the department head has made the case for exceeding midpoint. All I'm saying is there is flexibility there. And if have you the salary for the person who has been there 10 years and you find a qualified person that you want to hire in as though he or she has been there 10 years, in my view the money ought to be there in your budget. Approved by the court. Uft I'm having a hard time finding that the flexibility in fact is not there.
>> good. Because that is precisely the point. We used to have flexibility. And for a --
>> who took it? Who took your flexibility.
>> we don't have the flexibility anymore. For example, the folks that we hired recently in the county clerk's office for the purpose of handling facts, there were 13 employees that landed all at once for us to be able to do that job and they were funded all at minimum level.
>> newly funded positions then.
>> so that hurts my ability to have any flexibility.
>> there's a difference there, newly funded positions. But if had you generated salary savings as you indicated a minute ago, even on the newly funded position, if you came and said, hey, I got a chance to get jane doe here who is super qualify, you fund it at this level, I've got in my budget 5,000 more and I really think she's worth it, it seems to me that we approve those all the time without a whole lot of debate. What we think about in our private offices is another matter. So I'm saying maybe there's flexibility there that is known only to the courts, but other department heads are finding out about this.
>> judge, pranz the solution to this problem is we present taf's to the court to take all of these people who were not transferred to a range that was appropriate -- that was commensurate with their ability and skills, maybe we ask for your approval to do that.
>> but the problem is with newly funded positions, it's not a matter of compression, is it?
>> no.
>> it's a matter of not net setting the initial salary high enough.
>> well, it's funding at the minimum level so that I don't have any room to offer a range when I have a large population of people that have just come into the workforce.
>> but you gave us 10 new positions and you gave us x amount of money at a salary for each one of them. If somebody were to come back and say, court, we cannot hire people for this amount of money, my question is, why and how much would it take? And then we try to identify the source of funding. Compression I thought was for incumbent employees who sfo fo some reason or another were doing certain work and people newly hired in was making more than the ones who have been here. So the ones who are disadvantaged was the one with seniority and experience as etcetera, not the new folks.
>> and we are trying our best to explain this concept, we really are. I understand--
>> I'm trying to be with you every step of the way. Let me let you finish then. Yowsh experience is clashing with my experience on the court and how we have treated other department whose have come in.
>> then I guess we're a clash. We don't mean to clash, but we do have a problem and it's compression and it's caused by having a lot of new people because even though -- even when you talk about adding a big chunk of brand new people, which hurts your ability to have salary savings, what we've presented to you is a pattern since 2002 of us having constant turnover. We always have new people. The lion's share of our people. Nelda can give you statistics about her office, but of the 41 people, 41 clerks who are working in civil probate and misdemeanor, only four of them vl there five years -- only four of them have been there five years. All the rest of them have been there a much shorter time than that. Half of them have been there less than one year, and for the clerk court one level job, it takes a year just to get proficiency. For probate clerk two's and higher level jobs it takes almost two years to get consistency. So most of our people who are coming in to work for us fit this category where they've just come in. They were not -- they haven't been around long enough to be -- what I'm trying to say is the people who have been around long enough have received performance based pay that raised them up, so when the minimum level was raised for all the new employees, what we had was an inequity for the other half that there was no way to raise them up unless we came to the court and said please transfer this position to the level that is applicable to their skills for that salary group. Let me keep going. I'm going to try to explain what we're work with because we both think it's complicated. And all we know is we're having real difficulty keeping people working for county government right now.
>> there was good news and bad news about the actions for green circled items. Green circled items were just those employees where the market salary survey showed they should have been at a particular level instead of where they were and the court took action to raise everybody up to the minimum. Only 22 employees in the county clerk's office rn affected by green circles, so it's a much smaller number than you're used to seeing in the average. 56 employees in the saks office, but once again that's nowhere near everybody. So what we end up with is this situation where we've got people who have been on the job for awhile. Say maybe we've got a high performing person who is qualified for performance based pay because they've done a good job for the last five years, they're doing terrific, we appreciate them, they're there everyday. They deliver for county government. And what happens is that the brand new people get hired in at the market salary that shows this competitive with that job. And we -- so the people who are there and who have been our most loyal, most hard working rltion most productive employees are now paid at the same level as someone who just walked in yesterday, pranz just starting their career and very little experience. That is compression depression. And that's what we're trying to address is the employees who have been good to county government, that we can no longer be competitive with, but it's also the group of employees that we've asked for the last five years, please hang on. The Commissioners court will take action on this to put us back competitive for the marketplace. And what we're looking at now is we're asking you to just give this one more short, one more look to try to deal with the problem. Real quickly we'll tell you the story of barbara and marty. This is one of the examples of two real life people that you may have very well walked up to one of our counters and gotten services from. Barbara's brand new, she gets hired in at the minimum level for the job. She's thrilled with the job. And then shortly after she's gone to work for us, the Commissioners court completes its work to do market salary assessment. And she discovered that her position is actually worth this amount in the marketplace and so she gets a raise and she's thrilled. Her co-worker on the other hand is this really great guy who has been performing top-notch for county government for several years and he's thinking, oh, great, I'm going to be recognized for having contributed to county government. And what he discovers pretty quickly is no, he's not recognized. And so while the brand new people, the ones that qualified at the minimum level for the new assessment are happy, we have this entire other half of our population that is now flattened out. And if we'll go to the next slide. This chart shows the flattening out that I'm talking to. On the top you'll see that depending on their skills and education and what they bring to county government when they're hired by us, we had a range of salaries that was paid. The chart below shows that because the market assessment came up, we dealt with that, but it flattened out everything else. So what we're trying to deal with is the employees who are in this category that got -- that the minimum salary reached up to, but then we didn't do anything about highly skilled, highly competitive workers that we would like to retain. Let me give you another example of the inequity. Our vacant team leader went from a 12 to a 15, and so the pay grade for this went up accordingly to stay competitive with the market. This person, though, is responsible for supervising a group of other employees and what we've listed there is the range at which they are paid. You can see some of them are brand new and some of them are long-term employees. And there are only five. What I end up in a situation is that now the person who is responsible for training and supervising these workers, sometimes after hours because I mentioned once again that we're trying to do overtime to keep our backlogs down, now makes less than the people that this person is supervising. And I'm going to talk in just a minute -- I'll maybe add it here. That we've also lost the capability to be able to offer overtime to some of our more experienced employees. And that had to do with the exemption status. So one more tool that was available for the office to be able to get things done has now been taken away from us. And that was just a law that we had to deal with. But if you're no longer -- if you're one of those people no longer earning overtime, but yet you're responsible for the supervision of people who will be working overtime, what do you do in that situation?
>> that one that you just left, the minimum for the position is 33,764. The problem you say is employees that work under that team leader, three of them make more.
>> three of them were longer term employees that were at a -- at an assignment level less than the supervising person. And two were brand new. So of the five, three were longer term, two were brand new.
>> why is this team leader making only the minimum for the grade?
>> let me get you the answer to your question.
>>
>> [inaudible - no mic].
>> did you hear that? We're hamstring strung because we don't have the money to say within salary savings, please hire this person commensurate with their responsibilities. We don't have it.
>> how did you get the rest to pay 37,000?
>> because they've been here for years and years.
>> where is it written that the that the that the leader, who has been here a shorter time, should make -- I guarantee you there are 100 people at the county that make more than I do, that I supervise.
>> I understand.
>> and there are 100 more that I don't supervise. I just don't get caught up on that.
>> we don't either. I completely argue with you. Just being in county government for years and years or just having a particular position does not necessarily merit any kind of -- that's not the reason --
>> but lately we've been giving you cola's every year so sisterty has paid -- so seniority has paid off.
>> we all appreciate the -- the employees appreciate the cola, but it does not address compression. It hurts compression.
>> butt seniority --
>> neither of us place a lot of -- seniority is not our driving thing.
>> [overlapping speakers].
>> this example, I could come up with a whole lot of reasons why it doesn't make sense to me, but if -- so on this, I think you ought to make the case for the team leader making more money than the three people under him or her.
>> if that were my only problem, then that would be simple and I wouldn't have to take up so much of your time.
>> absolutely because there's another set of questions that have been to be answered first. You can't say a supervisor aunt to make more. There are plenty of examples where that simply isn't the case.
>> I agree with you and I suspect that nelda does too. The difference that we're trying to demonstrate here, and I will give you as much information that I need to make it clear, is what we've got here -- we don't care so much about long testifity, what we care about is the skills they bring to the job. I'm looking at what can this person produce and at what level do they come in? It doesn't matter to me that they're necessarily a supervisor, but typically supervisors are hired in because they have higher skill levels, they've got more experience, they know more of what's going on and what to do. It isn't the basis of the fact that you're supervising that makes them qualified for a level commensurate with the skills and ability, it's that they have the skills and ability that they can put to use to work for county government.
>> I guarantee you that there are examples all over the county where senior employees will make significantly more than a team leader or a crew leader.
>> we certainly agree with that, but that's not our point in this case.
>> it's my point as one of the policymakers who has to vote on the funding.
>> we would hope --
>> I don't know how you don't look at that and factor it in.
>> because it's not the real reason. The real...
>> ...they look at it and go I'm not going to get much of a raise. They get a five percent pay raise in there for each of those, but for the additional responsibility is for something that we can do. So that's one factor that does come into play is you don't have to make more to be the supervisor, but if you want one of those would to be the supervisor, be that's what you're up against. I find that many will take it, five percent is enough. But depending on the job and what the has sells are.
>> but there are people who don't want to be a supervisor. Don't want to supervisor people.
>> he if you stay here the last five years if you have gott five, six, seven percent increases annually. So the performance pay we fund one percent, but you can get a lot more of that based on performance. We leave that to the department head. All I'm saying is that for me to -- for me to connect the dots, we've got to do a better job of throwing out figures. More than throwing out figures. Answer this for me.
>> we've got reams of figures for you.
>> so is your problem the employees that have been here and working and what they make --
>> and have qualified for performance based pay. That group.
>> compared to those who are newly hired and the salaries that they make.
>> yes, sir.
>> and your problem is that based on recent market salary surveys, we hired the new people in at salaries higher than those who have been working here.
>> correct.
>> exactly. It's depressing.
>> retention owe but if your problem is retention, the people who have been here so long and are leaving are not paid at the minimum level, are they?
>> no. Well, it depends on if -- you could be an employee who only got a cola because your productivity wasn't particularly good. But if you are a producing member of county government and went above and beyond the job be descriptions and you were qualified for performance based pay and it did push you into a higher bracket, they were the ones that gave more than 100%.
>> let me let you finish. Finish. Commissioner Daviser ]
>> any of y'all can interrupt me any time you want.
>> no. M ing to letouue was an issue in the last budget cycle and I see we still didn't put it to bed, and even from the cmp reserve that we were looking at and going through those different options. I'm going to let you finish.
>> thank you, Commissioner. In fact, I remember your pulling me aside and asking me, is this going to work. And what I had said to you at the time was I really hope so. I'm very optimistic. I'm anxious to get tools to try to address this problem. That's why we're back. We've been working with the other departments this whole time to gather the statistics you want and all the vacancy rates and all that stuff to make it available to the court so we can ask for your help to address this problem.
>> once again, the compression depression doesn't have anything to do with longevity, per se, nor with cola. It is a different problem altogether. I already mentioned the fact that some of our employees have gone from nonexempt to exempt and they are no longer qualified for overtime pay. That has also created an issue. I mentioned earlier that one of the reasons why our salary savings is not sufficient to be gliebl be and to hire people in commensurate with their ability is that weech got so many new people because we've had high turnover all this time, plus we've got facts implementation to deal with. And the tax office has got almost the exact same situation that we have in all of these cases. Now let's talk about one of the things that was mentioned, just use salary savings. We don't really have any salary savings, not in a new environment like that. Why don't we use overtime funds? Well, I've been trying to use some over time funds to deal with the backlog. Why don't we use performance based pay? If you recall earlier I had said there were 22 employees in the clerk's office that were green circled. I think that was about $45,000 that was apportioned to the clerk's office for that issue. That's not very much none money. The performance based pay for the tax office is a little over $40,000 and the performance based pay allocated to the county clerk's office is a little over $38,000. Well, once again that's a dime problem a dollar solution. We don't have the capability to solve this problem by ourselves. We have to ask you for help.
>> a others since we're talk being the county clerk's office. Does the 38,000 apply to 3,910,000 so actually the overall amount that you would need to fix the problem is 263 rather than 310?
>> no.
>> no. You're saying 310 plus the 38,000 is currently available to use in real performance pay?
>> really the basalry that you're qualified at really is a different answer to a different question than it is are you a good producing, productive employee of county government and do you qualify for performance based pay. Everybody who has been there long enough to qualify for the job at the minimum level and been there long enough to receive perhaps a cola is one category of people. We're talking about high performers here.
>> I thought that's exactly what performance based pay is for, for high performers.
>> it is. It's not to fix cola and the not to fix compression. It's to try to retain people who have given more than 100% to county government in their particular jobs be.
>> maybe I'm not understanding. Isn't the compression issue maybe the lack of flexibility in your salaries to create a career ladd four ladderfor the folks who are more than minimally qualified? So it really is a performance issue, a retention of high performers?
>> [one moment, please, for change in captioners]
>> this may be quick.
>> okay. Alexa has been with the county clerk's office for 15 years. She is terrific. And she likes her job and she's successful at it and has gotten performance based pay. I think every time that it has been made available by the court. Because of her strong work ethic and her high productivity. And now she knows that a law firm could snatch her away tomorrow. She knows that she could be someplace else and make better money. She could probably even go to one of the other courts and make better money. But she likes her job here. She likes the people in county government. Some of us work here just because we love county government. So she's --
>> that's a compliment.
>> she considers herself the luckier employee. Her but her excitement over the market salary assessment raising her salary to a more competitive level where she could go someplace else and get that same money was quickly dashed because what happened was is that we took away her ability to on overtime because she was one of these people no longer classed as non-exempt, now she's exempt. So she can't earn overtime and now the new people that she's got coming in and working for her did get the benefit of this -- of the green circle assessment. But they are now -- there's no recognition of her -- of her productivity and her service to county government.
>> she could work overtime.
>> no, she cannot. If she does work overtime she cannot be paid for it.
>> when she did work overtime and get paid, what was the source of that funding?
>> temporary salaries. I have some temporary salary money that is budgeted for overtime. Typically that is not enough for what I need for overtime in order to keep backlogs under control. So I used the overtime designated by the court, plus I pull from what little salary savings that I have to deal with the backlogs.
>> temporary salary savings today is how much?
>> 0, I think. Do you know?
>> it's -- it's a people in at the salary levels. So we have this pool of money over here that keeps building when we have these turnovers, these vacancies, so we go back in and pull it out. We are paying overtime rates so we are not getting the productivity we should be.
>> salary savings --
>> yes. I go way back.y, this is we have worked together when we were both much younger.
>> yes, we did.
>> are you able to show that of the 300,000 plus dollars exactly what you would do with it? Why?
>> slot by slot.
>> the categories of slots or slot by slot.
>> the -- a couple of the -- of the tenants of what we are asking the court to do today is that we are -- we have whittled this problem down to started out as more than a 500,000, excuse me, more than $600,000 problem. We have gotten down to under 450. That's an estimate based on...
>> ...capped. We do not recommend that we take anybody who's skills seem commensurate at a level higher than midpoint. We are talking about capping at midpoint. We are trying to give you a very conservative proposal. This is not about just going crazy here. We are only talking about just trying to fix this so we won't lose our good people, I can hire good people in the future. That's how you can up with the estimate for 310,000. Yes, judge, it is -- we added that up by going through each individual employee assessing what their skills and education were relevant to the position they were applying for. And by the way the court spent some time talking about underfills when you all were working on this issue before. There was not one underfill. These people are educated and qualified, at least for the tax office and i, we bring in, you know, the best person we can get and so as a result of years of having followed that policy, we ended up with good, strong people who qualified under the new requirements, met those new abilities, performed even beyond that, near performance analysis and still want to -- weren't recognized at the -- the green circle addressed the market salary assessment problem. It did not address the compression depression...
>> ...i can on some of this stuff. When we went through the budget cycle last year, during the budget process, this issue was before us as far as how do we deal with compression, compression was a big deal. Throughout the county because there's the situation where we don't have the separation between employees that were maybe part of the market survey, of course we looked at the job family, administrative job family, we looked at those, we could see that -- we also had to look at the green circle employees. What we ended up trying to do during that time because my recollection served me properly, we had different options where we could look at a collection or a combination of remedies, remedies meaning that -- that we could look at and add the green circle employees which we did. But also we also looked at the -- the performance based pay issue which we said okay we could use performance based pay money, but on top of that, we said okay there's a different combination, we also liked to package in the
>> [indiscernible] by doing those three things, we came up with a product. Then again we had a problem with compression. I asked at that time, that -- probably need to be a compression reserve probably set aside. Okay. But all of -- all of the different options were available for us, of course the court -- the court selected one, we went with it. So my concern is that since we have -- since we have come up with the market survey analysis and also our consistency as far as allowing the county employees to have access to a cola that kind of kept things separated to keep compression from being so significant or as severe as it has been. My concern I guess, though, is have all of the -- but what the court also decided to do, if my recollection served me, y'all can help me now, but is that we could take that money, apply it within the department, cola money, but also your performance based pay money and apply equitiably to avoid compression issues as much as possible. My question is was all of that done? And of course asking hrmd this particular question with a market salary survey and the separation to make sure that these persons that are -- that are hard for this particular job family compared to the market, where are we as far as that's concerned? Does that meet the guidelines and the goals as far as what's out there in the market? Especially after the county has applied these remedies to some of these situations, especially in the cola aspect of things because there has been equal application of a cola to ensure that we do have the kind of separation to some of the things that you have brought up that movement with that person sitting next to another person that just came in. There has been a movement there. That movement. But as far as the -- to continue the -- to separate we knew that there was also a problem to make sure that -- that there was probably compression reserve money made available to -- in case it wasn't -- but we asked and did charge you, each department with your own ingenuity, your own discretion to address to the best of your ability the compression issues. That's my question is posing it was this actually applicable to dana's concern? I guess hrmd as far as some of this stuff is concerned also.
>> I understand exactly what your question is Commissioner. What the court's previous work in this area did was it made it better for us to be able to hire brand new people who did not have a whole lot of experience. We are more competitive at getting brand new people without a lot of experience, that is a good thing. But that was the -- the cola and -- and green circle money that contributed to that ever. Actually the cola made the compression issue worse. Because it flattened out as you can see on this screen here. It flattened it all out. I'm sorry, I meant green circle made compression issues, I'm sorry. Green circle made the compression issue --
>> it moved it, like moved it. Moved the table.
>> shifted everything on that. We are in a better position to recruit brand new people who don't come us to -- with a lot of years of experience for a lot of skills. We bet we are competitive for that population of employees and we are not competitive and we are at risk for not being able to retain the employees who have been high performing in county government.
>> but the question still comes back, why are these persons green circle. Again, is it -- I don't know if they asked all of those questions, I do know that there was a reason for these doing what they are doing, they should be getting paid more money than according to the market. Of course they have been doing this for a while. I'm concerned about the money attributes to these individual employees. But anyway but go ahead and see what you are saying. I didn't mean to cut you off.
>> just as a final comment, I want to open it up to my colleagues. The population that we are trying to address is not people who have just been here for a long time. What really throws it out of whack is that if you are one of those high performer, high productivity people who qualify for performance based pay, those are the folks that we are having a problem now retaining and keeping and it's going to get worse. The -- the slide that I am showing you, you don't have to change it. The slide that I showed you about the -- about the number of months a position -- the number of people that have been in a particular position and the number of months it was vacant is the measure of what our vacancy is right now. We are all suffering from that vacancy issue. So we have got these -- the tenured experienced county employees who are leaving for better jobs and it's difficult for a -- for us to be competitive for also commensurately competitive people coming in at that salary. We can get new young folks new to the marketplace, they are terrific but we need to be able to have a ladder to be competitive at all ranges, have as much expertise as possible for more bang for the buck. Let me turn over to -- your question to colleagues here.
>> ircle question.
>> okay.
>> the money allocated was that -- what we ended up with was $40,000 to fix $130,000 problem.
>> so we can't address all of the compression issue goes because we don't have the money. It's not there. It's approximately 40,000 there.
>> the 40,000 -- is that the green circle money.
>> performance based pay.
>> one percent allocated by...
>> ...green circle. The county clerk got 22 employees at, darn it, $45,000. The tax office got 56 slots addressed at $147,000.
>> plus you got the one percent.
>> for performance based pay which is another.
>> that was flexibility money: we didn't tell you what to do with it. We said here's one percent you do what you think your department needs done.
>> we did a dime's worth of the dollar problem.
>> that was your call.
>> well yeah I guess that I chose that.
>> [laughter] so we redirected 4%, we did the one percent really to the department. On top of that we set up the green circle reserve but the departments were limited as to what they got from that because we had already identified green circle employees.
>> that's correct.
>> so you were a total number of employees is what?
>> I think it's 114 total. Of the people involved in this problem --
>> can I just ask two or three questions.
>> 89.
>> total number of employees 114. Budgeted employees or employees on the job today?
>> it wouldn't include the number of temporaries, so it's budgeted slots.
>> budgeted full-time.
>> uh-huh.
>> so today you have how many of these filled?
>> probably all but about three because we went on a recent hiring bend.
>> three vacancies.
>> I think so. I have resignations coming in. It's always a fluid picture. Coming and going.
>> my questions are not, though.
>> okay.
>> all right. So of this 114 how many do you have compression problems with.
>> 89.
>> you have got how many budgeted slots nelda.
>> 125.
>> how many are vacant today?
>>
>> [indiscernible]
>> [inaudible - no mic] two.
>> you have two?
>> two vacancies altered jobs.
>> [inaudible - no mic]
>> you are 0 vacant today.
>> yes.
>> and you have how many employees with compression issues?
>>
>> [indiscernible] what's the attrition rate in the clerk's office, 10 percent in the county clerk's office or 11.
>> right, linda.
>> yes.
>> guess at it for me. Way higher or lower or about that?
>> county's is 10 to 11%.
>> we can certainly ask linda to give you the latest statistic on this, we always run higher than the average.
>> give it to me next week nelda.
>> I sure will.
>> if you have a calculator.
>> I don't have a calculator. I got a pen. I want the percent. Because the county is at 10 or 11%, I ask the sheriff the same thing every year. Every department that chats with us about salaries, they say I'm losing all of my people. How many vacancies, what's your attrition rate. I would like to interject aim the district clerk, when you do consider these two departments, the district clerk is also in this administrative family. We have not had an opportunity to put together the level of detail that day in a and nelda have, however last year we worked with human resources to try to upgrade and reclassify all of our employees and yes we knew that there was a compression issue. However, over 08% of my employee -- 80% of my employees, I have one hundred employees, three vacancies right now, we are in the process of interviewing. We have had some good applicants in some cases so we are certainly the -- the requirements were upgraded. We now hire employees that have a certificate as a paralegal or other kinds of experience, so we are looking very closely at the employees that we are hiring. We are long-term employee. Some of them average 20 to 25 years with the county. That's in our criminal division, we have had some good employees, that's probably where we are going to find some of this compression issue. What I wanted to -- to comment on was that whatever definition we have of compression, that we include all of the departments within this administrative family. Not just two departments because then inequity starts setting in. I want to make sure when we worked really hard last year to try to reclassify everyone, it included anybody within the family. We just didn't do the district clerk's office. Anybody that -- that fed within the administrative family was looked at and I just wanted to make sure that the figures that you have before you today only includes two departments and we will work on our own figures as well, but I just wanted to --
>> here's my big problem.
>> we acknowledge --
>> my big problem is when we looked at the 5%, it was a significant amount of money. And we said based on complaints that we have been getting from rank and file employees, we ought to put 4% of this into a cola again. Again meaning we had done similarly for three or four years before last year. Then we said we would fund a green circle reserve to try to put as much of a dent in this problem as possible. Then we will give the one percent flexibility money to the department head to do what he or she believes is appropriate.
>> exactly.
>> performance based.
>> we will consider these issues dealt with for fy '07.
>> I understand.
>> my question is is this an early fy '08 budget request?
>> if it has to be.
>> or are you asking the court to reconsider its licy.
>> beg pardon.
>> we put it in our budget last year. Soou were aware that the problem is existed.
>> when it'sot funding that's the same as voting it down.
>> yes.
>> what we did put there though is 5% across the board. We take the full compensation amount, multiply that by 5% and get with the department head and work with it. I guess that I'm -- we told ours that's we were dealing with comp issues for '07. We didn't say we were dealing with comp issues thereafter, meaning in '08-twine twine there would be -- '09 there would be other comp issues. In my view this is premature if you are looking at this year unless there's green circle money because we wanted that reserve to be used for employees unless you have figured out a way to creatively use your one percent in a way that requires court approval.
>> we have.
>> but as for my vote, in terms of generating new money, mid year, I wouldn't favor that. But I would favor taking a real good look and seeing if we agree that you got compression issues that -- that earth you did not cause or could not fix whether you caused them or not and can't fix. I mean, every year there are comp issues that are brought to us and it amazes me that the more they come, the fairer they seem. I want to do the right thing. But part of the question is when? And I don't know that we are fair to the process if we deal with these two or three sets of compression issues mid year when we told the other departments here's your one percent, do as you wish. I don't know how we don't -- I don't know how we close the door to them. Help me understand that.
>> okay. Rtf our recommendation, the lastagthat was up a little while ago, the last pagen your handout is to talk tyou abt the fact that t all of the green circle mon has been spent. Withonly 22 employees in the county clerk's office, that's, you know,the's been a -- a great heart and a great effort but not enough money to solve the problem. It's our job to come back around keep presenting this to the court until the problem is solved.
>> I'm sympathetic. But also mindful of this. When we budgeted the $650,000 in the green circle reserve, I thought we had more than that much in green circle need. So if in fact some of the green circle problems have gone away that we had identified and the money is in fact free, I'm agreeable to transferring it to deal with some of these compression issues.
>> thank you.
>> all right.
>> but did we do it on a first come first served basis or say x amount is available if you got compression need come get your pro rat take share after you pro rata share after you establish the need. Whether you like it or not there is a duty to try to be fair to all of the other departments. Those who listened and said we have there be dealt with the comp issues in '07, should be reluctant to come over. If they have not come because they hurt us, but they see us dealing with other issues, why wouldn't they say if you are dealing with compression issues, you hold on because I have got compression issues to bring, too. Those who heard this agenda discussed last Wednesday said the same thing. If the court is dealing with compression issues, you need to let me know because I put mine on hold based on what you all said after you approved the budget last session. Not to lecture you all, but you all know how I am.
>> there's one point --
>> [laughter] -- one point that I feel compelled to make. That is we tend to use compensation terms rather loosely sometimes and the term compression --
>> the county judge or...
>> ...like to
>> [laughter] here certainly not here but to put out among the departments who are faced with compression issues, the definition on which we base our recommendations to the court when we brought the report in to you in fy '06. That way we will be using a baseline, not only that, an industry acceptable definition of what -- of what compression is against which the departments can make their determinations for funding. And just for the record, also, as we all know and remember that h.r. Did present to the court compression as an issue among the departments that are represented today. Obviously you made your policy decision.
>> we recall that. That's true, I mean, that was part of the green circle reserve and also the compression reserve
>> [multiple voices]
>> many of the problems that the departments are
>> [multiple voices] to you today, you of course made the policy decision, 1% --
>> [multiple voices]
>> funding decision.
>> I'm not debating that. I'm respecting the policy decision of the court. With the 1% that was allocated the clarification it was for performance based pay salary adjustments and to address priority level compression issues.
>> exactly.
>> so it was a 3rong
>> [mtiple
>> aseterminehe commissis court.
>> how much green circle money is left?
>> p.b.o. Tracks us. Is travis here?
>> [inaudible - no mic]
>> right now, roughly out of this family, how many compression issues do you think that we have? We have 72 here, 50, 22. I mean, are we talking about hundreds?
>> lou anne do you have? The definition -- what -- we can't give you that answer now. The reason is that we have proposed that the department submit to h.r. A plan against which we would apply criteria for determining which of the positions we felt were being compressed. So we don't have an exact number that we can provide for you.
>> can you give me that next week?
>> yes, we can.
>> let me ask you this. Christian in the preliminary budget, what factor is there for the '08 preliminary with regards to compression. Because this -- if this number is really big, I mean, it's going to have some pretty about ratchet effect on -- on constraints that you place prior. What we would put on the table at this time is 3.5 to 4%, let the department head determine how they wish to spend that in order to solve their problems. We have done that in the past, there has been debate and discussion as to whether that should be cola, performance based or pom press whether that should be any number of compensation issues. But for the preliminary budget we would not be -- we have been bold in the past and said it should be all performance based pay and that has been changed in the process allowed it to be modified. So -- so left to our devices it would be here's a pile of -- money. We are hoping, spend it the way that you feel that you should to do the compensation problems in addition to spend the incremental difference between an employee who has five or 10 years of experience when they leave the departments get to keep that money.
>> it's the one pot we have talked about before, that sometimes creates, often creates the challenges that we are faced with, in keeping your compensation structure competitive. The compression issue was sort of a fallout of that. The one pot set of resources are not really addressing all of the major issues that -- that are required to be addressed to keep your system competitive.
>> the reason why we would do what we just said is because compression is the fact of life in any organization. There's accept wrabl, uncomfortable compression and unacceptable compression, what you have before you is an array of compression issues, some of which are understandable, some of which are discomforting, which of which might be unacceptable. That's --
>> that's the criteria that we mentioned that based on the plans that we would get from the departments we would be able to work with them and make that determination. Generally that's predicated on -- the degree that chris was talking about, you would go right to how many job openings do you have? And I mean if you have two out of 120 soon not to be two and -- and/or fewer or as few of that out of your saying, that may drive somebody to think you don't you have perhaps an uncomfortable situation with people who are happy, but it is not, you know, something where you are gg to go, are we going to base or is that going to drive the conversation. I thought in my original question, the preliminary budget we have got a three and a half to a 4% cola.
>> goal.
>> goal. So what you are saying is we may be needing to send a message that if you have a pretty sizable compression issues, then you may need to look at that three and a half percent as where you are going to need to take care of your compression which is going to leave you a whole lot less money for your cola. Then you are going to tell everybody that you know what? You are not going to get a cola because we have taken, you know, that -- that percentage and we have used it to -- to fix, you know, our compression.
>> the other thing just to set a predicate, if there's a request from any number of departments, there's over 300 employees represented with the department heads here, we would have discussions with those department heads about whether this is the most important issue facing this department in terms of its service level and if that's the case what services have been provided, what services could be identified, what employee slots could be frozen through attrition to help solve the problem over time. Over 300 employees or slots maybe there's one slot, maybe there's three slots, maybe there are 10 slots that could be frozen to allow the money to be used for -- to meet these department head and elected officials needs and then to have them unfrozen over time over the next number of budget seasons. So I do think that there is some control, maybe not as much as anybody would like, that will be the kind of discussion that we will have during the this. Vacancies have been filled, just a lot of other things that I think that we can look at to try to add this. I'm kind of looking forward and back yard to some of this stuff. Those specific questions that I had, what happened in the last fiscal year setting was something that -- you know, I still -- still an issue. Something we are going to have to look at have been before your cola or anything else, there was some 725 -- 723 admin support positions that were designated as compressioned. That would have been total county wide. General fund only.
>> previous action of the court fixed a lot of that. We are only talking about the remaining part at this time. Also up on your screen, there are the numbers for performance based pay, that represent, an idea of where we would be relative to your goal for the next budget year. That's how much money we are talking about. 1.1 million that the court approved, divided between 75% of that in the reserve, 25% in the am toreization reserve for the serious of different actions actually two more coming up. More realistic number and -- and assuming that the court approves those two, there will be approximately 240, $245,000 left in the green circle reserve, 81,451 in annualization preserve, that equates to approximately 325,000 available in basis do we anticipate other green circle employees against that reserve.
>> at this point there may be some vacant position, we are not expecting more than what, maybe how many -- 20. 20 max, that will take care of all of the green circle positions.
>> did you all have in mind a mid year request or a -- or a Commissioners court get ready for a budget '08.
>> yes, sir. Thank you for that. What you have left for earmarked, hear how much is left, let us have that to apply to this problem. That's what we are asking for you mid year.
>> might there be not enough. I mean --
>> if everybody surfaced remember --
>> the following Tuesday we had about 35 --
>> this is one of several families.
>>
>> [inaudible - no mic]
>> this is one job family --
>> [inaudible - no mic]
>> [laughter]
>> there are other job families that have compression issues also.
>> well in other words --
>> we are only talking about admin.
>>
>> [indiscernible] out of 245,000 you can't take care of 700.
>> are there any other families that went five years without a market assessment?
>> no, this might have been --
>> probably the largest departments, we are three of the largest departments our office -- offices in the county as well.
>> I do think whether it's mid year or for '08 we still need specific information about the employees. So I would recommend at least getting with hrmd trying to work through those.
>> based on the compression definition that we are using?
>> if there's a problem with the distinction, come to the court.
>> christian's point is the compression so painful that it's not good for county government? I think that's a fair question to ask. We are absolutely willing to work to define that for you. And perhaps we can set aside some that are compressed but not so much, you know, but there may be salary adjustments that you are talking about. Not all of those compressions, adjust to the salary.
>> huh-uh.
>> linda, since this is
>> [indiscernible] liberal to some degree as far as applying cola's each year, for the employees of Travis County, what has that done as far as market salary served as going out into the market to see what everybody else is paying for those same positions. Has that kind of kept us in line with the -- with the colas.
>> it does. The way that you have seen that is as we bring in the annual reports, typically the cost to -- to bring the positions to market is generally less than what it would have been had you not applied the cola.
>> cola.
>> so it is keeping pace with the market pretty much.
>> okay.
>> and allows that to happen. One thing that affects all of the Sam larry stuff. Whenever you are doing it like we had today, you can get upside-down real fast, there's comparisons that you have got to go out and pay people to get them to come to work given, you know, we are in one of those crazy times where people will leave you I mean because you know it's not like they will leave you -- they don't have to leave you over one or two thousand dollars. They leave you over 5, 6, $8,000. That's what the market can command today, especially if you have some talent.
>> county government has other -- other factors that we can compete in the marketplace for. A wonderful organization, other key benefits besides salary, even on the salary, a lower run of competition, still in the marketplace, it isn't salary for everything, we have to at least number the ballpark.
>> alexa told you that.
>> we are not really lagging in the market either. We are very competitive when it comes to the salary structure, both in the private sector as well as the public sector.
>> one of the things that we are experiencing is that the employee will leave, a couple of months later saying well maybe I should come back and/or that they realize that -- that their job with the county was something that they wanted to do after all. So --
>> less money.
>> but you have that job.
>> no.
>> 5,000 less.
>> it's competitive.
>> it's your job. We are now being competitive.
>> since you fixed that first part we are in much better shape.
>> okay yeah.
>> working on specific information for certain employees trying to move to the next step.
>> okay.
>> thank you very much for your time.
>> thank you all for this very, very
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Last Modified:
Wednesday, March 28, 2007 8:00 AM