Taylorsville employee salaries return to hands of administration

A new ordinance adopted by the city council returns the control of employee compensation to administrators.

By a vote of 4-1, the council approved having city employee salary grades unconnected with the budget, which it had been by an ordinance previously passed by the city council. This relieves the administration from having to appear before the council each time a change within a department’s budget needs to be made. These changes could be as simple as an employee’s raise, or as complex as the transfer of one employee’s duties to another.

Lynn Handy, chairman of the budget committee and former council member, said, “The administration needs to have the ability to administer salaries, benefits, and so forth for employees. The council sets the budget and the administration administers that part. That’s the way it should be.”

This became an issue in 2010 when the council found that 11 city employees had proposals to, or had already, received compensation above their assigned salary grade without council approval. Though there was funding in the budget for these actions, three of the 11 employees had their salaries rolled back to where they’d been five years previously. 

The ordinance was then fixed to include all city job titles and assigned pay grades in the budget ordinance. The action was met with some consternation from employees and city administrators, as they felt the council’s decision did not allow them to handle the day-to-day supervision of the city.  

The three employees whose salaries were affected appealed the decision to the city’s employee appeal board. The board decided that based on the wording of the ordinance, the council was legally within its right to do as it had done.

The new ordinance allows the city council to pass the budget and to allocate funds to specific departments in the city. However, it does not give council the permission to determine management of those funds; that lies with the administration. The city council will still be privy to the job descriptions and their pay grades, just not as an integrated part of the budget.

Most of the council felt comfortable with this decision. “We have done our job by passing the budget. The administration then does their job in working with that budget,” said councilmember Dama Barbour.

The passing of the new ordinance is a relief to city administrators who feel it allows them to do their job as managers of the city. For them, it returns the direction of employee compensation back to where it belongs- with the administration.

“It’s a realignment of separation between the executive and legal branches,” Mayor Russ Wall said.