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This $58 million raise for the 13,000 Maricopa County employees will give each of them a pay raise of about $4,500.

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Maricopa County Board of Supervisors OKs $58 million in raises

By Michelle Ye Hee Lee The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Jun 19, 2013 1:54 PM

The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors on Wednesday approved a detailed plan to give $58 million in raises to its employees.

The county is one of the Valley’s largest employers, with a workforce of about 13,000. The board action ends a freeze of nearly six years on merit-based pay increases as the county struggled with decreasing tax revenues resulting from the economic downturn.

The wage freeze in those years created internal pay inequities, increased employee turnover and triggered ongoing struggles to recruit and retain employees with key responsibilities whose positions have cost the county more to temporarily fill with contracted experts.

The compensation plan approved Wednesday will pay for performance-based raises for employees who have worked for at least one year and have the qualifying rating in their annual performance reviews. Raises are expected to average 5 percent.

“The objective is pretty simple: It’s to retain and recruit the best employees we can,” County Manager Tom Manos said.

The board-approved policy sets a guideline for department directors and elected officials, who will determine how to distribute raises for their own employees. Each department or office will receive a lump sum equal to 5 percent of its total payroll.

The leaders of each department and elected office know their departments’ unique recruitment and retention issues that need to be addressed internally, and will have discretion to distribute raises “in the way that makes most sense,” said MaryEllen Sheppard, assistant county manager who oversees human resources and compensation.

The raises are designed to address several compensation issues created by the raise freeze, which contributed to growing employee disgruntlement over the years and made it difficult for the county to hire and keep employees.

In fiscal year 2014 budget presentations to the Board of Supervisors this spring, county elected officials unanimously pleaded with the board to restore employee raises, describing how wage stagnation affected their agencies.

The Clerk of the Court’s office, for example, has had such high turnover that between January and mid-November 2012, nearly one quarter of about 200 courtroom clerks had left the county. It takes at least five months to hire and train a clerk, creating work backlogs for remaining courtroom clerks while new hires are trained.

County officials also hope to address salary inequities among groups of employees. In some cases, newly hired workers are paid about the same as colleagues with five or six years’ experience.

The new compensation policy allows county officials to make market adjustments to address employee-turnover rates in certain specialized positions where they have had an especially difficult time recruiting and retaining employees. Those positions include county attorneys, information-technology staff, health-care workers, nurses working in jails, probation officers and sheriff’s deputies.

Consequences of not keeping employees in those positions are costly, Manos said.

“We can’t live without the services of those people and when we can hire them as employees, we hire them as contractors whose compensation far exceeds what they earn as employees,” Manos said.

The last cycle of market adjustments took place between fiscal years 2005-08, according to the new plan. Market adjustments are made to ensure employees with qualifying performance ratings are paid competitively with peers in similar classifications.

“Governmental (and many private sector) employees have not received consistent raises over the last five years. Some even took pay cuts or furloughs,” according to the new plan. “While the county is behind its competitors in terms of employee salaries, markets have not moved uniformly nor has the impact of compensation been consistent across county departments.”

Employees receiving merit raises should see their pay increase by the end of July, but market adjustments are expected to take a few months longer.

Throughout fiscal 2014, which begins July 1, county administrators will continue to track monthly turnover rates by department to see if there are other positions that they need to address, Manos said.

“When it comes to compensation, it’s hard to satisfy everybody. But I think everybody appreciates the resources that the Board of Supervisors put to this issue,” Manos said. “This is, I think, by any measure, a lot of money that’s been set aside for compensation, and reflects our board’s understanding that we need to act to retain and be able to recruit the very best employees.”