Pay scales tip in favor of county staff
A salary structure review leads to some big raises, but some wonder if it was approved too hastily.
By MICHAEL SANDLER
Published February 13, 2005
The white envelope looked like a bill.
But when Kathryn Swain opened it last September, the Pinellas County park and recreation operations manager learned she was getting a $23,142 pay hike.
The 38 percent increase wasn't a promotion or a merit raise.
Last fall, county officials quietly awarded pay scale adjustments to Swain and more than 80 members of the management team after a consultant redesigned their pay plan.
"I never questioned my pay," said Swain. "I was happy where I was at."
Some, like Swain, received substantial bumps. Others got a few thousand more per year. More raises are planned over the next two years.
And every one was approved by county commissioners on Sept. 21 without a word of public discussion.
The increases are part of a three-year salary plan that county officials privately pitched to commissioners during individual meetings and then folded into the county's $1.5-billion budget. Commissioners approved the budget unanimously.
Before the pay adjustments, top Pinellas executives generally were paid on par with their counterparts in Hillsborough, Orange and Palm Beach counties, all similar in population to Pinellas. Now, many Pinellas senior administrators are among the highest paid in the state.
A St. Petersburg Times review of the pay increases found:
* Seven county staffers now are paid more than $150,000. That's more than the sheriff, the county court clerk, tax collector, property appraiser and supervisor of elections -- who are elected.
* Pinellas' No. 2 official, Gay Lancaster, is among the highest paid assistant county administrators in the state. After more than $31,000 in pay increases since August 2003, she makes $168,703.
* In the past year, Tom Borawski, a division manager in public works, has received pay increases totaling $37,626 -- a $3,219 annual merit raise, a $16,594 promotion and nearly $18,000 in payscale adjustments. He now makes $102,014. His boss, the department head, makes $143,036.
* Marcia Crawley, the county's new communications director, is paid $99,321. She received a $12,321 increase just nine weeks after being hired.
* For some managers, salary ranges changed so dramatically, their new minimums are very close to their old maximums.
How this happened raises troubling questions about how much government officials knew when they adopted the new pay plan.
Neither the consultant nor county officials compared the new salary ranges with the old ones. And the commission approved the plan -- and an estimated $400,000 in salary adjustments -- without knowing crucial details.
"A $23,000 raise?" Commission Chairman John Morroni asked a reporter, hearing about Swain's increase for the first time. "You have to have some damn good statistics to show that is necessary."
That was just the kind of information never publicly discussed.
"Perhaps it was undersold," said Commissioner Calvin Harris.
County Administrator Steve Spratt said he wants to pay his staff a competitive wage. His management team was due for a salary review, he said; the last was done in 2001.
They have greater responsibility, Spratt said. He eliminated 53 positions after joining the county in December 2001 and trimmed $3-million from the budget. And he added several new programs, creating more work for his staff.
"They've been asked to do a hell of a lot more stuff," said Spratt, 49. "They've had their budgets cut. They have new performance measures . . . The pressure is pretty intense."
But most of the staffing cuts have been to the ranks of lower-level workers, not managers. Spratt's management team actually has increased by 23 positions since 2001.
Spratt, whose salary is $202,699, noted that before the new salary plan, the average salary for his 233-member management team had gone up less than 4 percent annually since 2001. The average salary was $84,175 last year, before the new pay plan was adopted, up from $75,517 in 2001.
Higher salary ranges attract new talent, and Spratt said he's about to lose a number of top managers to retirement. When they go, he wants to recruit nationally.
Spratt said no job candidate turned him down over money. He has filled about half a dozen senior jobs since taking over, three with external hires. But two of those hires -- airport director and economic development director -- negotiated salaries at the very top of the former range, he said.
That presents two problems for Spratt. He cannot reward these new hires with raises unless the board expands the salary range. He also worries that promising candidates might pass on applying if the money they want isn't available.
He cited his 2003 search for a new director at St. Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport, which had a salary range of $79,257 to $122,848.
Spratt reviewed a dozen applicants from seven states before choosing Noah Lagos, who was making about $120,000 per year for the city of Fresno.
He's happy with Lagos, but Spratt wonders about the field of applicants he might have attracted with the new range of $110,246 to $165,369.
"You are never sure," Spratt said. "The only thing I do know is that you want a pay range that will at least allow you to get people at the table."
Yet the new ranges benefit current employees, not just future hires.
Assistant County Administrator Keith Wicks, 58, has worked for the county since 1972 and was well above his new minimum of $129,024 when Spratt awarded him a $13,346 "catch-up adjustment." The combined merit raise and payscale adjustment in October pushed Wicks' salary up to $154,858.
All staff members need to be paid their market value, Spratt said. So he raised some employees' salaries to the new minimums, and others beyond to account for their experience.
Spratt didn't set the new salary ranges. He left that to the county's personnel director and a private consultant. And Spratt didn't compare the proposed ranges against the old ones before recommending them to commissioners. He assumed the personnel experts had done that.
"I'm certainly not a compensation specialist," Spratt said.
In late 2003, Spratt and Dave Libby, the county's personnel director, decided to review top managers' salaries. So they hired Ray Temple, an Indianapolis-based human resource consultant.
Temple, who was paid $18,000, focused on Spratt's management team as well as senior employees in the county attorney, human rights and information technology offices. He did not look at anyone working for constitutional officers, such as the sheriff and county clerk.
Spratt oversees a staff of about 2,700 employees.
Of those, about 2,470 hourly workers are protected by a personnel system established by the Legislature. Those employees' salary ranges are reviewed annually and were not reviewed by Temple. Last year they received an average increase of 4.15 percent.
Temple compared the pay structure of about 300 of Pinellas' salaried employees with 10 other counties, including Hillsborough, Orange and Palm Beach. At Libby's request, Temple looked at: Miami-Dade and Broward, Florida's largest counties; Gwinnett and Fulton counties near Atlanta; Mecklenburg County, including Charlotte, N.C.; and Hennepin County, including Minneapolis.
Temple called for substantial hikes in salary ranges, making some of the old maximum salaries the new minimums. Under the old plan, for example, the maximum salary for the county's risk management director was $93,862. Temple suggested a minimum of $95,348 and a maximum of $143,022.
Temple said he wasn't hired to compare the old ranges with the new, so he didn't. Instead, he wrote job descriptions, ranked employees internally, surveyed an external market for select jobs and built a new pay scale using a software product.
"I didn't look at the old system at all," Temple said. "In actuality, the county's (old) salaries were fairly good. But by putting this system in place, you get a better handle."
Like Spratt, Libby accepted Temple's ranges without comparing the two schedules side by side. But from memory he noticed sizeable shifts.
"I looked at the difference and said, "Good grief, that's a big difference,' and then listened to what the consultant had to say," Libby said.
Libby and Spratt rejected Temple's recommendation to immediately move a large number of employees beyond their new minimum to a market value, which Temple set at 15 percent above the minimum.
Instead, they decided to move all employees to their new minimums in the first year, and spread the market value increases over three years. With that strategy, they set out to convince commissioners.
Gay Lancaster understood that task well.
Lancaster, the interim county administrator before Spratt arrived, handled the last major change to the management salary plan in 2001.
Lancaster, Libby and a consultant appeared in public before the commission and explained the $82,370 impact. Commissioners discussed it briefly and approved it unanimously.
Lancaster said she went out of her way to keep the matter public because of her interim role.
Spratt handled the 2004 plan differently.
He scheduled no public discussion. Instead, he had Lancaster explain the plan in private meetings with each commissioner. "I didn't sense any huge discomfort," Lancaster said.
Spratt also sent a memo to commissioners in August outlining the budgetary impact of the changes -- an estimated $400,000 over three years.
Spratt didn't schedule a separate vote on the pay plan. Instead, he attached the new ranges -- but not the old ones -- to the 2004-05 budget, and tacked on a single sentence in a memo to commissioners:
The resolution adopting the total final 2004-2005 County Budget includes the proposed Exempt Pay Plan recommended by the Unified Personnel System.
In an interview with the Times, Spratt acknowledged that Lancaster handled the 2001 plan in a more public fashion. But he maintains that the 2004 plan was approved at a public commission meeting, and therefore handled publicly.
"You can always take a number of items and call them out in a separate session," Spratt said. "That just didn't occur to me with this particular one."
And, he pointed out, the commissioners didn't ask for more information. "Had they done that, and said, "We need to know more information,' I would have done that," Spratt said.
Months later, commissioners are split on whether they knew enough about the pay plan.
Commissioner Ken Welch said all his questions were answered. So did Commissioner Susan Latvala.
However, when handed a list of the 65 county employees making more than $100,000 a year, Latvala gasped at some of the salaries.
In the end, she said she still supports the plan.
"I felt perfectly comfortable with it, and I trust Steve," Latvala said.
Calvin Harris is less confident. He intends to ask for a better explanation next month, when commissioners meet with staff to discuss next year's budget.
"We never talked about creating a new salary schedule," Harris said. "It was always about studying the existing schedule and making adjustments."
Commissioner Karen Seel agreed with Harris that the plan was undersold.
"I think a full walk through the whole plan would have been a wise course of action," Seel said.
Commissioner Bob Stewart said he is troubled that Pinellas is far from the only county hiring consultants to review pay.
"Those studies become self-fulfilling prophecies," Stewart said. "Everybody does a study every so often to find out where they rank, then they bump (salaries) up . . . And all of the sudden the ranges are constantly escalating."
Libby, the personnel director, did not wait for commission approval. Six days before the vote, he wrote employees announcing recommended salary changes. He included each employee's new pay range.
Swain read her new minimum was $84,130. That telegraphed a $23,142 increase, her largest in 11 years with Pinellas County.
Swain, 47, wasn't stunned. "I saw it and thought, good, it's great."
Swain, a park and recreation operations manager, said she works hard. She reviews grants awarded to private recreation programs and reimbursement requests from residents who live in unincorporated areas and pay higher fees to participate in city recreation programs.
Temple considered her job duties and grouped her into a pay classification with 19 other jobs, including assistant director for information systems, assistant highway director and fleet manager. Temple's report indicates Swain wasn't individually compared with counterparts in other counties.
Swain was hired in 1994 as a park ranger at $8.28 an hour. She became a park supervisor in 2001 and was promoted to her current job in November 2002. The promotion came with a $19,183 boost, raising her pay to $55,849. After two merit increases, she was making $60,989 when the white envelope arrived announcing her new salary of $84,130.
"I'm worth every penny," Swain told a reporter.
Crawley said she was told of a likely five-figure increase before she was even hired.
Last summer she left a reporting job at WFLA-Ch. 8 to become Pinellas' communication director. She accepted $87,000 a year and started work Aug. 2.
On Oct. 3, she received a $12,321 bump, bringing her to the new minimum of $99,321.
Crawley, 36, said the pay adjustment was part of her negotiations.
"When I left the TV station, it was something that they discussed as a pretty good possibility," Crawley said. "I factored that into my decision."
Comparing pay in Pinellas with other counties is complicated by differing job descriptions and experience levels. But a look at the most senior executive positions is revealing.
Lancaster makes more than her colleagues in Hillsborough ($152,589) and Palm Beach ($153,772) and is almost even with Broward ($172,000), where the population is nearly double that of Pinellas.
Spratt's other top assistants are also doing well. Average pay for an assistant county administrator is about $148,000 -- higher than Hillsborough ($134,333), Palm Beach ($145,343) and Orange ($133,755).
Four of Spratt's assistant administrators and the utilities director received "catch-up" raises this fall that included merit raises and payscale adjustments. The lowest was $10,699, the highest $13,945.
Spratt said his senior team deserved the extra money because former administrator Fred Marquis purposely kept salaries low.
Marquis doesn't dispute that.
"That was my goal," said Marquis, who retired in 2000. "I didn't want our salaries to be an issue. I wanted our performance to be an issue."
Pinellas' assistant administrators now have the potential to make as much as $193,536, their new maximum.
That outrages former Clerk of the Circuit Court Karleen De Blaker, who retired in January at age 74 after 30 years in elected office.
De Blaker was most upset that so many "bureaucrats" earn more than elected officials. Her salary of $135,222 was set by the Legislature. So in October she dashed off a letter to court clerks in Florida's seven largest cities. She urged them to contact state lawmakers and press for more money.
"Why would people want to run for office . . . to make less than a bureaucrat?" De Blaker told the Times. "That's what's bugging me."
Staff writer Michael Sandler can be reached at sandler@sptimes.com or 727 445-4162.