2 extra salary grades, boost in non-union employee pay to be mulled by Bloomington city council

A new salary grade system for the city’s non-union employees, which would eventually mean big pay increases requiring millions of dollars of investment, will be considered by Bloomington’s city council on Tuesday.

The council’s regular meeting day was shifted from Wednesday to Tuesday, due to the Juneteenth holiday.

The current non-union salary system has 12 grades, each with a range of compensation. Each job title is assigned a grade. The compensation for the person with the job title falls somewhere in the range.

The proposed new system has 14 grades, many (but not all) of them with significantly higher salaries, at both the low end as well as the high end of the ranges.

According to the staff memo from Bloomington’s human resource director Sharr Pechac, the purpose of the new salary grade system is to “relieve pay compression between mid-level employees and their supervisors, as well as to better differentiate between grades.”

Pay compression is a term used to describe a small difference in pay between employees no matter what their skills, experience, or job responsibilities are.

As a part of the same ordinance that changes the salary grades, the council will be asked to approve the creation of a new deputy clerk position for communication and outreach, in connection with supporting city boards and commissions.

New deputy clerk position

The designation of a single position that is responsible for oversight of the board and commission recruitment and onboarding process was a recommendation from a consultant, which was presented to the city council two years ago.

According to Pechac’s memo, the fiscal impact of the new deputy clerk’s position is $87,998.77, which includes the salary, budgeted at the midpoint of the pay range, a flat amount for benefits, retirement contributions, and taxes.

That’s based on the current salary grade of 7 in the current 12-grade system, Pechac wrote to The B Square in response to a question. When the job title is added to the salary ordinance, the 7 will point to Grade 7 in the current ordinance, not the revised table.

When the city implements the new 14-grade system, the new deputy clerk’s position will be re-evaluated, along with all the other jobs at the city, according to Pechac.

Transition from 12 to 14 salary grades

The salary ordinance for 2024 includes a table with the 12 salary ranges and a list of each job title with its salary grade.

Based on Pechac’s response to a B Square question, if the city council approves the change to the table in the salary ordinance, that will not automatically give all non-union city employees a raise. She put it like this: “No impact will be felt until a new salary ordinance ties specific, rewritten and rescored jobs to the new ranges.”

Pechac wrote: “We are in the process of refining, reviewing, and rescoring all job descriptions (this will take months to complete) to align with the new system.”

The average low end of the ranges in the new 14-grade system, at $68,259, is about 35 percent higher than the current 12-grade system average low end, which is $50,665.

The difference is less significant on the high end. The average high end of the ranges in the new 14-grade system, at $87,957, is about 6 percent higher than the current 12-grade system high end average of $82,635.

The average mid-point for the 14-grade system, at $78,108, is about 17 percent higher than the current 12-grade system midpoint average of $66,650

On the lower end of the scale, the new 14-grade system includes some jobs with lower low-end and high-end salaries, compared to the old 12-grade system.

Even though there will be no immediate impact to the city’s budget as a result of the new salary grade system, it will eventually have a big effect. Pechac wrote to The B Square: “[The impact] will be significant—millions—and we won’t know that until we complete the regrading process.”

Pechac continued, “Once we have more detailed information to inform budgeting, we can determine at what pace we can implement changes.”

Pechac indicated that the administration will need to determine how many of the city’s positions can be transitioned to the new 14-grade system for 2025. She wrote: “If it’s not possible to shift all City positions at once, the highest paid positions will be the last in priority to adjust.”

Even though union employee wages won’t be impacted by the salary grade changes to be considered by the city council on Tuesday night, if the new 14-grade system is approved, the new non-union compensation is likely to factor into new collective bargaining negotiations in the next few years.

Based on The B Square’s arithmetic, the total personnel line for all departments in the city of Bloomington for 2024 is about $40 million. If the 17-percent mid-point increase in the 14-grade system, compared to the 12-grade system, were applied citywide, that would work out to around a $7 million impact.

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