MOUNT VERNON – A consultant recommended the city create a pair of new engineering positions and adjust existing staff salaries at a cost of nearly $300,000, an official told the Mount Vernon News.
The Mount Vernon City Council heard from the consultant that the city pays non-union staff wages that fall below market values, Safety Service Director Rick Dzik said.
Auditor Terry Scott was asked to evaluate the report and offer his thoughts on the numbers and what the consultant said it would take to bring pay up to the market average. He also would need to determine where the city might have money to fund those pay increases.
Clemans, Nelson & Associates, the city’s consultant, also did an organizational assessment and recommended some changes and a reorganization of the public utilities department. Fourteen other municipalities of similar population, median income and income tax net collections were used for comparison.
The cost to implement the pay scale and increase wages to market averages would be approximately $260,000, which Clemans Nelson proposes implementing in stages over three years.
“They're recommending a project manager and the assistant city engineer. The assistant city engineer, they're recommending, (should) have a professional engineering license. That way, they can fill in for the engineer in his absence or when the engineer eventually retires. There's some kind of succession planning there,” Dzik said.
The assistant engineer would be reclassified as a project engineer. It would recognize all the credentials that employee already has and would still need to be brought up to market average pay, he said.
Dzik said he suspected after interviewing assistant utility director candidates and hearing their salary requirements that pay for some of the supervisory positions in utilities and public safety force chiefs might be low.
The consultant recommended an organizational structure for Public Utilities similar to how the city changes its Public Works department last year. The consultants discovered the following concerns: Chief operators find it difficult to act in a true supervisory capacity, no incentive exists for employees to gain additional certifications and a disconnect exists between management and employees.
Zoning district proposed for Cooper Progress Park
The city is considering a new zoning district for Cooper Progress Park to bring more business to the industrial area, Dzik said. Like the compensation and organization analysis, this zoning proposal will get a deeper discussion by the City Council at its next meeting, he said.
