The City Manager Shouldn’t Rewrite History When Making Salary Increase Recommendations for City Employees

I’ve mentioned before that I think the city manager deliberately misrepresents things to the public and the city council to get what he wants. It happens far too often, and he’s far too smart, for it to be otherwise. The salary increases he’s recommending this year are no exception.

Let me be clear – I don’t have a problem with our city employees receiving pay increases. I worked for local government for years, so I know what it’s like. I also don’t really have a problem with the city manager’s recommended base salary increase of 5%. The Michigan Civil Service Commission recommended a 5% general increase for the 2022-2023 fiscal year and a 2% general increase for the 2023-2024 fiscal year, cautioning that while budgets may look good for the upcoming fiscal year, that may not always be the case (and increases to base salaries go on forever). The Society for Human Resources Management predicted 4.6% average salary increases for non-government employees in 2023.

Last year, our budget wasn’t as fulsome as it is this year, and the city manager asked for a general 3% increase (with individual adjustment) and a 2% savings match for a new voluntary retirement savings program. This year, he’s asking for a 5% general increase (with individual adjustments discussed below). This is arguably not really all that out of line given our historical compensation struggles in the city. My issue is the city manager’s propensity for misrepresentations to the city council and the public, this time to justify some of the deviations from a 5% across-the-board increase that he referred to as an “inflationary increase.” It’s wrong, and it’s never called out by the city council.

Before getting to the criticism, I want to commend the city manager this year for at least looking at Independence Township salaries and viewing them as a competitor when making salary recommendations. That’s better than last year when he relied solely on a Michigan Municipal League salary survey. The city manager tried to bizarrely justify salary increases based on the taxable value of our homes as compared to the taxable value of the homes in other communities (some with populations that were multiples greater than ours), and the salary survey data he used was limited to only those communities that choose to voluntarily report their staff salaries to the Michigan Municipal League. The up and down taxable value of our homes is something we don’t control, and the real metric to consider is the resident population (or the number of homes) because that’s a better indicator of the number of people needing city services. I appreciate that more realistic viewpoint this year. I hope that going forward, the city manager will view all the local municipalities as competitors and ask them what they pay their employees (he could use the FOIA to get that information if it would be easier).

I also appreciate that the city manager left out all the exaggerations he made last year, which included a claim that fast food and lower-paid industries were paying $20/hour. He continued with his well-worn “house of cards” analogy in his presentation this year, i.e., our employee group is a fragile house of cards that will completely crumble if we don’t pay competitive rates, but as discussed below, that concern apparently doesn’t extend to our city clerk.

So, let’s discuss this year’s proposed salary increases, and in the case of the treasurer and administrative/treasurer assistant, I’m going to provide a few years of salary history.

City treasurer:

Our current city treasurer was sworn in on March 13, 2017. At some point, he accepted a second job, and the city accommodated him. I’m glad we were able to do that, and it worked out well for both the city and the treasurer.

The budget presentation for the 2019-2020 budget year (in the June 24, 2019, council packet) indicated that the treasurer had been working 30 hours per week Monday through Friday (but only 9:00-12:00 on Friday because the office was only open for a half day at that time). The city manager’s budget proposal changed the treasurer’s hours to an undisclosed amount of time on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, 9:00-5:00 on Wednesdays, “plus remote work” (which “assume[d] that a city laptop [was] available for remote access”). The treasurer’s 2018-2019 salary was $30,000 per year and no increase was proposed for the 2019-2020 budget year.

The budget presentation for the 2020-2021 budget year (in the June 22, 2020, council packet) stated that the treasurer was apparently actually working only 25 hours per week during the 2019-2020 budget year (rather than the 30 hours per week stated in 2019-2020 budget presentation), and he would continue to work 25 hours per week during 2020-2021 budget year. No salary increase was proposed.

The budget presentation for the 2021-2022 budget year (in the June 28, 2021, council packet) contained a proposal from the city manager to reduce the treasurer’s annual salary from $30,000 to $25,000 for his 25-hour work week. (Please don’t let the word “proposed” throw you off – the city council always rubber stamps every request the city manager makes.) The reason given for the salary reduction was because the city manager transferred some work from the treasurer to what he was now referring to as the “administrative/treasurer assistant” in his comments, and “treasurer assistant” in the position title on his chart. (More on that position below.)

The budget presentation for the 2022-2023 budget year (in the June 27, 2022, council packet) requested a 3% increase for the treasurer’s 25-hour work week, bringing his annual salary to $25,750. There was no reference to any change in workload between the treasurer and the “administrative/treasurer assistant,” so presumably things remained the same.

At the May 22, 2023, 2023-2024 budget presentation, the city manager told us that the treasurer no longer has a second job and is now physically present in the city office four days per week. Because of that, the city manager proposed a restoration of the $5,000 salary cut and an additional 5% increase, which the city manager calculated as equivalent to a 24.4% overall pay increase, bringing the treasurer’s salary to $32,038. (The 5% increase was applied to the $25,750 annual rate, and $5,000 was added after that.) This was the largest proposed increase for any city employee.

The inference is that the treasurer is now back to doing his regular job for the city, and the city manager has advised that he also answers phones and helps residents.

Administrative Assistant or Treasurer Assistant:

I’m honestly not sure what her title is because it frequently changes.

The September 23, 2019, final city council minutes state that our current incumbent was hired as a part-time administrative assistant, effective September 24, 2019, and she was scheduled to work on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The budget presentation for the 2019-2020 budget year (in the June 24, 2019, council packet) listed a proposed (hourly) salary of $14.42 for the then-vacant position, which was an increase from the $13.22 that the recently retired administrative assistant was making. Please note that this is the only true hourly position in the office, meaning that this person must be paid for every hour worked and must receive time-and-one-half after 40 hours of work under wage and hour law, the same as our Department of Public Works (DPW) employees. The other three office positions (city manager, city clerk, and city treasurer) are paid an annual salary that is divided into biweekly paycheck increments, no matter how many (or few) hours they work in a week.

The June 22, 2020, budget presentation for the 2020-2021 budget year referred to this position as “administrative,” paying $15.00 per hour and working 15 hours per week. There is no explanation why the hourly rate increased from the budgeted $14.42 per hour to $15.00 per hour without council authorization, and no additional increase was proposed for the 2020-2021 budget year.

The June 28, 2021, budget presentation for the 2021-2022 budget year referred to this position as a “treasurer assistant” and stated she had been working 20 hours per week during the previous 2020-2021 budget year. No explanation was provided for the increased work hours (up from 15 hours per week), even though every work hour change for an hourly employee affects the overall salary budget for the year. The city manager proposed a 25% salary increase to reflect a “workload shift from treasurer” and a continued 20-hour work week. (The workload shift was an accommodation due to the treasurer working a second job, discussed above.) The city manager misrepresented her then-current hourly salary as $11.54 per hour and stated that the proposed increase would bring the rate to $14.42 per hour, which you’ll recall was the hourly rate that council approved two years earlier for the 2019-2020 budget year when the position was vacant, and less than the $15.00 per hour the city manager told the city council she was making as of June 22, 2020.

After this budget was approved, I received a bill for $17.00 per hour for FOIA work. Since the FOIA charge is supposed to reflect the hourly rate of the least paid person capable of performing the work, I expected a bill for $14.42 per hour. I asked for payroll records and learned that our “treasurer assistant” was actually being paid $17.00 per hour and that her salary had been unilaterally increased to $17.00 per hour in January 2021 – months before city council approved a salary increase to only $14.42 per hour for the 2021-2022 budget year.

At the 2022-2023 budget presentation delivered at the May 9, 2022, city council meeting, the city manager’s chart still showed the “administrative assistant” was receiving $14.42 an hour with a 20-hour work week, and he proposed a 3% salary increase to $14.86. In response, I published the payroll records that I’d received on this website to show our “administrative assistant” was actually being paid $17.00 per hour. In apparent consideration of that blog post (which discussed more than this discrepancy), the city manager altered his salary chart for the May 23, 2022, budget discussion and now admitted the “administrative assistant” was making $17.00 per hour, and he proposed a 3% increase to $17.51 per hour. His revised chart now stated that she worked 17 hours per week during the 2021-2022 budget year, rather than 20, and he anticipated that she would continue to work 17 hours per week during the 2022-2023 budget year. On June 27, 2022, the city manager made an additional change to his salary chart, showing that the “administrative assistant” worked 17 hours per week during the 2021-2022 budget year and he anticipated she would work 13 hours per week during the 2022-2023 budget year. This proposal, the one that was ultimately approved by city council, stated that the “administrative assistant” would remain at $17.00 per hour with no wage increase.

The May 22, 2023, budget presentation chart for the 2023-2024 budget year reveals that this position, once again referred to as a “treasurer assistant,” actually received a 3% increase to $17.51 per hour (which wasn’t part of the final 2022-2023 budget presentation approved by city council). The city manager is proposing a 5% wage increase to $18.39 per hour for the 2023-2024 budget year. The city manager removed the number of hours worked per week from his proposed pay increase chart, so for all we know, our “treasurer assistant” could be working less than 13 hours per week now. The city manager told us that she “kind of comes and goes. She travels a lot, but that’s fine. When she’s here, she does special projects and is valuable.”

I wonder – do we have an actual administrative assistant, or has all the clerical work been shuffled off to the clerk and treasurer (who both have tons of independent responsibilities to fulfill under Michigan law)? What exactly does our “treasurer assistant” do now that the treasurer has returned to his regular job with the city? The justification for the 25% salary increase in 2021 was a workload shift from the treasurer to the “treasurer assistant,” but she’s apparently not in the office very often due to travel and works on “special projects” that are not defined.

It’s not clear why this position is being treated more favorably than the treasurer’s position when his hours and duties were reduced.

City clerk:

I think we’ve treated our new city clerk very unfairly. I wrote about her questionable hiring process here.

To summarize, even though the city manager tells us how much everyone is underpaid every year, he decided to deliberately underpay our new clerk when she was hired in January. He had no council authority to make an employment offer to her, yet he did so anyway. He had no council authority to underpay her by $5,000 (offering her $30,000 instead of the $35,000 that the previous clerk made, apparently so he could magnanimously give her a “raise” at some point), but he did so anyway. The city manager asked for council approval after the fact.

The city manager originally told the council that he would increase the clerk’s salary to the approved $35,000 amount at 60 or 90 days, which he claimed was the end of her probationary period (even though the city’s probationary period is six months). Apparently, the city manager increased the clerk to her full, council-authorized salary at some point after January, since he alluded to this increase at the May 22, 2023, city council meeting as he presented the 2023-2024 budget proposal. Who knows if the increase was given at 60 days, 90 days, or six months. The city manager used what he’d done as the sole factor in deciding the clerk’s compensation for the 2023-2024 fiscal year.

As far as I can tell, the city clerk is doing an excellent job. But because she was finally brought up to the salary established by council for that position – $35,000 – the city manager is recommending a zero increase for the next fiscal year in recognition of this artificial “raise.” Even if you accept that the clerk is the only employee who has been here half a year rather than a full year as a reason to reduce what the city manager said was a 5% inflationary increase, wouldn’t it have been equitable to give her half of the general increase amount, or 2.5%? After all, isn’t the city manager concerned about the clerk finding a better job? If he was worried about the overall salary budget, he certainly could have found the money by taking a fairer look at the administrative/treasurer assistant’s salary and treating her the same way he treated the treasurer when his duties were decreased. Or, he could have asked council to consider a small raise. After all, it’s not as though the city manager is working with a limited amount of salary dollars to distribute. To the contrary, it has always appeared as though the city manager decides what he wants to do, presents only those external factors he thinks will provide justification, and the city council always gives him everything he wants.

This isn’t the first time the city manager has shafted the clerk position because of poor salary administration practices. The city manager’s May 9, 2022, and May 23, 2022, proposed salary charts for the budget year 2022-2023 would have increased the previous clerk’s salary by only 3%, from $30,000 to $30,900 per year.

Since the clerk is considered an exempt employee under wage and hour law (as are the city manager and city treasurer), she doesn’t have an hourly wage that goes up or down based on the number of hours she works. The city manager used hours worked as a budget presentation trick for a number of years to justify his own annual wage increases, but he’s also an exempt employee and admitted (in writing) that he has no documentation for his actual work hours (and I would note that the law doesn’t require any). For that reason, if you want to calculate a fictional hourly rate for an exempt employee’s annual salary, you divide the annual salary by 2080 (the total number of work hours in a standard 52-week working year, based on a 40-hour week). Hourly salaries are annualized by multiplying them by 2080. That’s the only way you can compare apples-to-apples for salary administration purposes since most of the world works a 40-hour work week. The fact that our city manager, city treasurer, and city clerk receive an annual salary for usually working less than 40 hours a week is just an additional bonus for them because they are not hourly wage earners.

I discussed the inequity in paying the clerk so much less than the treasurer assistant when their salaries are equalized here. In that blog post, I pointed out that the 2022-2023 “treasurer assistant’s” $17.00 per hour rate annualized to the equivalent of a $35,360 ($17.00 x 2080 work hours), which was unfair to the clerk who has far more responsibilities. It’s unclear if my argument persuaded him, but the city manager adjusted the clerk’s salary in his final June 27, 2022, salary chart to reflect an increase from $30,000 per year to $35,000 per year. Though $35,000 is better than $30,900, it was still inequitable in the city’s overall salary administration program because of the actual hourly salary we’re paying the “treasurer assistant,” which is apparently $17.51 per hour and not the council-approved $17.00 per hour.

That inequity is worsened in this year’s budget proposal since the clerk isn’t recommended for any wage increase. If you annualize the proposed salary of the “treasurer assistant,” she will make the equivalent of $38,251.20 ($18.39 X 2080), as compared to the city clerk, who remains at $35,000. I think we should do better.

City Manager:

The city manager made no misstatements about his own salary in his 2023-2024 budget presentation. He suggested a simple 5% increase to $43,260 per year. I suspect that the city manager is fully availing himself of the 2% retirement savings match that he pushed through last year, which was in addition to the existing pre-tax savings program that employees could invest in at their own expense. I can’t say who is getting a retirement savings match, or how much they are getting from taxpayers. But if the city manager – or any other city employee – is fully availing himself of the 2% retirement savings match, that’s an additional 2% that you need to mentally add to every proposed increase.

When considering whether compensation is fair or not, you should also remember that the Clarkston City Council has authorized an exceptional (and I think unmatched) employee leave time policy. For example, our city manager receives 14 holidays, 6 sick days, and 15 days of vacation, for a total of 35 paid days off per year, which is equivalent to almost 17% of his annual salary. The city manager, along with the city clerk and city treasurer, all work a four-day workweek. Using the city manager as an example, this works out to almost 9 weeks of paid leave time per year (8.75 four-day workweeks to be exact).

DPW Laborer:

The city manager said everyone loves him, and 5% was good enough for the 2023-2024 budget year.

DPW Supervisor:

Our DPW supervisor sounds like a freaking rock star. He’s saved the city a lot of money by performing mechanical work on our equipment, and he’s apparently certified to take down trees as well, which also saves money.

The city manager proposed a $3.00 per hour increase from $22.00 per hour to $25.00 per hour. The reason given for this increase is that Independence Township is trying to lure him away. Our former clerk works for Independence Township, and I’m pretty sure her husband (our former DPW supervisor) does as well, so this “luring” likely emanates from them. Still, I don’t quarrel paying a market rate for someone this talented, which the city manager says amounts to a 13.6% increase and is still less than the job offers the DPW supervisor says he’s been getting. It sounds like he’s saved the city taxpayers more than that increase will cost.

So, there you have it. This is what salary administration is like in the City of the Village of Clarkston. In the business world, we start with an overall dollar amount for salary increases. For example, if you have a current salary budget of $1,000,000 for all your employees and have been authorized to increase salaries by 5%, your final salary budget can’t exceed $1,050,000. This means that your rock stars will get more, and your less-than-stellar employees will get less (or nothing), because when the increases are finalized, your overall annual salary budget cannot increase by more than $50,000 in total. In Clarkston, our city manager doesn’t consider internal equity and waits until an employee gets a better offer before he considers external competitive pressure. Whether or not the city manager’s heart is in the right place (he claims he’s enthusiastic about employee compensation), it’s unfortunate that our city council apparently lacks the necessary business experience that would question the end result.

New year, same stuff.