The Tuesday, November 12, 2024, agenda packet is out, and there are some things taxpayers should pay attention to. That is, if we can even have a city council meeting in light of the fact that Section 3.7 of our charter sets the start date for new council member terms: “The term of office for the Councilpersons and Mayor shall commence on the second Monday in November at 7:30 p.m. local time next following the date of the regular city election at which they were elected,” which means the old council terms end at that time. Unfortunately, we still don’t know who the mayor and new council members are and the three council members who weren’t up for election don’t constitute a quorum that would allow a meeting to go forward. Has the city attorney has advised it doesn’t matter, and is he unconcerned that any decision made during this meeting can be challenged?
Should the meeting go forward, the first issue I want to highlight is city manager Jonathan Smith’s request for a $3,500-$4,000 salary survey targeted to city employees that he can use as leverage to convince the city council that taxpayers need to pay even more money for employee salaries, on top of the raises we gave to everyone on July 1, 2024, and the additional raises we gave to the treasurer and the newly-minted deputy clerk one month later, effective August 1, 2024. The second item is an extension of the $40/hour contract clerk to December 31. The two really dovetail into each other.
If Smith were managing in a way that justified his own almost $45,000 per year salary for working four days a week (with three weeks’ vacation and fourteen holidays), he would notice he missed an important step. Since he’s a Stellantis retiree, what I’m about to say should not be a surprise to him. Businesses – and governments – constantly search for ways to combine responsibilities, eliminate positions, enter into contracts for services, or work together with other businesses and governments to share services all in the interest of reducing costs and increasing efficiencies. No one approaches a review of organizational cost and efficiency by spending thousands of dollars to justify spending thousands more dollars in salaries before that initial work is complete.
Smith’s excuse for needing a specialized salary survey is that he can’t find any candidates with clerk experience to fill the vacant clerk position. But that complaint rings hollow, because I don’t recall we’ve ever hired anyone with clerk experience. Looking at the last three hires, Jennifer Speagle was an administrative assistant who helped the previous clerk with elections, so her training was all on the job. The closest that Karen DeLorge came to having clerk experience was that her mother used to be a clerk, but that hardly counts. Catherine Ashley also had no clerk experience.
Obviously, Smith knows he’s not going to find anyone with previous clerk experience at a salary that our 928-person city can afford. That’s the price current residents continue to pay today for the incredibly short-sighted, almost irreversible vote for cityhood so long ago. Smith’s request for a salary survey is just another ploy to raise salaries – again – when his focus should be either on hiring a bright candidate and having the contract clerk train him/her or considering other ways to get the election-related clerk work accomplished. Going straight to “give us money to do a study so we can ask taxpayers to pay more for employee salaries” is not where we should be at the moment.
Seriously – does anyone think if the salary survey said we are paying too much for a position that Smith would recommend a salary reduction? (I’ll help with that – the answer is a hard “no,” because as Smith constantly tells us, he can’t survive without any of his staff even though he doesn’t die when any of them inevitably leave for better opportunities.)
We are allowed to combine the clerk and treasurer positions and have done that in the past. Perhaps the city council should consider doing that, rather than paying a contract clerk $40/hour (which annualizes to $83,200 for a 40-hour work week) plus $33,320/year for a treasurer who works part-time – if that’s even what his salary is. I’m pretty sure we could find someone who can do both jobs for less than the equivalent of $116,520 per year, don’t you? Or perhaps we could explore entering into a contract with another municipality for election-related work. Do you think we could do better than $40/hour for some other public body to handle our elections in addition to their own? And why don’t we know the answer to that question?
I said the combination for the treasurer and the contract clerk cost was $116,520 per year, but it could be more, or it could be less. City manager Smith is so bad at salary administration that we really don’t know what treasurer Greg Coté or the now-deputy clerk Evelyn Bihl actually make per hour or per year (and the only way to find that out is to FOIA their paycheck stubs). But despite that, let’s just go ahead and authorize Smith to hire someone to conduct a multi-thousand-dollar salary survey so we can play more games with employee salaries.
I’ve never been sure what Bihl’s title is. Smith has referred to her as an administrative assistant, treasurer assistant, and now she’s a deputy clerk. Essentially, she’s whatever Smith needs her to be to convince the council to give her more money. She supposedly received an increase to $19.30/hour effective July 1, 2024, based on the budget materials Smith presented to the council and the public (see page 30). But Smith’s September 23, 2024, salary increase request for Bihl asked the council to raise her salary to $21.00/hour up from $19.13/hour retroactive to August 1, 2024 (see page 22). This salary increase request was purportedly based on a Michigan Municipal League salary survey that Smith attached to the September 23, 2024, council packet – even though the next closest municipality population-wise (1,084 to our 928) pays its full-time deputy clerk $20.11/hour (see page 23). So why did Smith want to pay Bihl $21.00? Just because, I guess.
But wait, we can’t forget about the treasurer! At budget time, Smith asked for a 4% increase to raise the treasurer’s salary to $21.36 per hour (see page 30), but on September 23, Smith’s request for a salary increase for the treasurer claimed the treasurer made only $20.02 an hour and should be given an increase to $21.00/hour, retroactive to August 1 (one month after his most recent increase that purportedly raised his salary to $21.36/hour) (see page 22). And what was the justification for increasing the treasurer’s salary, if it really was an increase (since $21.00/hour is less than $21.36/hour)? Because we increased the deputy clerk’s salary to $21.00 for some reason, and the treasurer’s salary increase was necessary to “maintain a correlation between office salaries.” So, if the expensive salary survey results in a recommendation for even one increase, can we expect to see a request for more increases across the board to maintain that “correlation between office salaries?
Would it be too strong a word to say that Smith lies about employee salaries? Or is he just not competent when it comes to salary administration and refuses to become competent after over seven years on the job?
I don’t mean to suggest that all our city employees don’t work hard, and I especially don’t mean to impugn the hard work that Bihl did during the election. We should all appreciate the fact that she was willing to step up to the plate and take on election-related work when the previous clerk left without notice. Bihl also worked far more than her regularly scheduled two days a week during the election and deserves a huge thank you for that. But isn’t it fair to taxpayers to ask whether that $21.00/hour is a permanent rate, or can it be adjusted downward when Bihl is not doing election-related work (since she’s also the administrative assistant)?
A qualified city manager would look at how our city employee work is structured to see if there are better and perhaps less expensive ways to do things. None of the jobs in our city offices are immune from contract consideration, not even the city manager’s job.
If Smith is incapable of objectively performing an honest operational review, then the thousands of dollars he wants us to pay for a salary survey would be better spent to pay someone who can. Otherwise, you can expect to be asked for a tax increase to pay for all the additional salary expense in addition to paying the almost $200,000 in unexpected sewer-related repairs because Smith championed spending our water and sewer reserve money for the city hall/DPW expansion rather than using it as it was intended.