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Political junkie

Cap comes off commission aide salaries

By wire services
Published January 12, 2005

One week after declining to reject freebie football tickets, Hillsborough County's new "conservative" commission has voted to sharply increase the pay range of its aides.

Each of the commission's seven board members has two aides. Some act in largely secretarial roles. Others research issues for commissioners or act on their behalf to solve citizen problems.

The least they can be paid is $41,080 a year. Their salaries topped out at $61,630 - until Tuesday.

Commissioners voted unanimously to increase the top salary to $77,292. The vote was 6-0, with Commissioner Ken Hagan absent.

The issue was driven by District 4 Commissioner Ronda Storms. One of Storms' aides, Sandra Barkey, has been working for the county for more than 30 years. And she has maxed out in pay.

Barkey actually makes slightly more than the cap. That's because, despite the salary ceiling, county employees can still qualify for a "market equity adjustment," meant to reflect inflation and changes in pay for similar jobs around the region. That adjustment typically runs about 3.5 percent annually.

What Barkey and other county employees at the top of the salary ladders for their jobs don't get are merit raises. Currently there are about 1,400 employees in county government that are considered capped out.

Storms said that's unreasonable for her aides, who were forced to work extremely long hours over the summer when a series of tropical storms threatened her east county district. The aides don't get overtime.

They don't get the civil service protections that other county employees enjoy. They field often hostile phone calls from citizens and, in Storms' office, are empowered to address citizen concerns on her behalf. They also face job insecurity: Their bosses can lose re-election bids or be ousted in eight years due to term limits.

"This job requires a depth of knowledge that is probably unparalleled in other places," Storms said after the vote. "This is not a secretarial position. It may be in other places, but not in my office.

"In my office, I give my aides broad discretion to act on behalf of constituents and in my name," she said. "Because of that, they're held to a higher level of accountability. Someone in this office who has to suffer the slings and arrows from a variety of sources deserves the compensation and deserves a raise at the end of the year."

BEAN'S BEST BET: County Administrator Pat Bean has big plans. Make that Big Plans.

Bean will be meeting much of the morning today with all of her top directors. That's where she will unveil her initiative to make Hillsborough County the "Best County Government in the Nation."

Those are her capitalizations, not ours, and, sadly, are not followed by an exclamation mark.

In a letter to the directors late last month, Bean said the county's Strategic Planning Committee has been working for three months to develop a strategy to achieve the goal. She has mentioned it to commissioners, some of whom mildly questioned how she intends to prove such a warm and fuzzy claim if she achieves it.

To that end, Bean and her Strategic Planning Committee have developed a matrix. All strategic planning committees must develop matrices, along with flow charts, and usually a mission statement.

The three-page matrix rates the county's performance in terms of cost effectiveness, staff efficiency, etc., on a number of topics. For instance, in the category "Implement re-engineering or other quality improvement efforts, focusing on areas of need identified by customer feedback and benchmark comparisons," the county scores "high" for having the available internal expertise to achieve the goal. But the matrix scores the staff low in staff efficiency when it comes to actually doing whatever that means.

There's no mission statement associated with this particular effort yet, but an asterisk leads the reader to interpret "best county" as "the best county government in the U.S. at efficiently and effectively delivering services to our customers."

An attempt to reach Bean late Tuesday afternoon was unsuccessful. But in her letter announcing today's meeting with her directors, she had this to say:

"Some people have cautioned me to aspire to something less than the best," Bean wrote.

You can almost hear those people parenthetically telling her, "Don't do it, Pat. Don't do it!"

"They have told me we can't get there," she wrote.

("You can't win, Pat!")

"They are wrong."

Got a tip? Contact Bill Varian at 813 226-3387 or varian@sptimes.com

[Last modified January 12, 2005, 00:29:10]