New pay grades for Bloomington non-union workers OK’d by city council, could have $10M impact

At its Tuesday meeting, Bloomington’s city council unanimously approved a new salary grade system for the city’s roughly 430 non-union employees, which would eventually mean pay increases requiring around $10 million dollars of investment.

The old non-union salary system had 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 approved new system has 14 grades. The grades at top of the new scale have significantly higher salary ranges than the top of the scale in the old system. The grades at the bottom of the new scale have lower salary ranges than the bottom of the scale in the old system.

The $10-million per year figure came from Bloomington’s director of human resources Sharr Pechac as a ballpark estimate of the eventual impact of re-grading all of the city’s non-union positions that are listed in the 2024 salary ordinance.

As a part of the same ordinance as the one that approved the new salary grades, the council added a new deputy clerk position.

The new deputy clerk position is 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 Grade 7 in the old 12-grade system. When the new deputy clerk job title is added to the salary ordinance, the 7 will point to Grade 7 in the old 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.

Other jobs to be re-evaluated in the new grading system include the other three deputy clerk positions. The chief deputy clerk is a Grade 6 position and the two other deputy clerks are Grade 5 positions.

Councilmember Hopi Stosberg asked Bloomington city clerk Nicole Bolden about the difference between the Grade 7 deputy clerk position that the council was creating that night, compared to the Grade 5 and Grade 6 deputy clerk positions already in the clerk’s office. Stosberg asked: “Does that seem right to you, in terms of job responsibilities and job description?”

Bolden responded by saying that for the new job position, Erica De Santis, Bloomington’s director of compensation and benefits, had worked with her to clarify the duties for the new deputy in charge of boards and commissions. Grade 7 was the level that human resources had landed on, Bolden said.

The Grade 7 for the new position will be re-evaluated in the context of the new 14-grade system. Bolden added that her understanding is that the other deputy clerk positions will be re-evaluated in the context of the new 14-grade system.

Returning to the wording of Stosberg’s question, Bolden said, “The short answer is: No, it doesn’t seem right to me. But yes, it is where we are right now.”

Transition to the new 14-grade system

Besides creating a new deputy clerk’s position in the clerk’s office, the ordinance approved by the city council on Tuesday adopted a new 14-grade salary system, as a part of the city’s 2024 salary ordinance.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Pechac confirmed to the city council what she’d written in a memo, that 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 Pechac described it, she needed the council’s approval of the new salary grading system, in order to begin work to re-grade all of the city’s non-union positions. That meant that the salary grades for each position of the salary ordinance would point to the old table, not the new 14-grade table of salaries included in the ordinance.

From the public mic, The B Square asked about the somewhat odd status of a document that would contain a list of salary grade numbers for each job title that pointed to a table that was no longer a part of the document.

To resolve that question, the council eventually recessed the meeting, and sorted out an amendment to the ordinance that essentially delayed the effective date of the new salary range table until Jan. 1, 2025.

The fiscal impact of the council’s action on the pay grades will not be immediate. Enacting the ordinance does not automatically increase or decrease anyone’s salary, Pechac said.

Pechac and deputy mayor Gretchen Knapp confirmed to The B Square after the council’s vote that the new salary grade system would not see an inflationary adjustment as a part of the 2025 salary ordinance. The new salary grade ranges were developed with the idea of implementing them in 2025—even before the council amended the ordinance to delay the effective date for the salary grade table.

Pechac estimated the eventual impact at around $10 million a year.

Knapp told the council that for the initial year of implementation, the administration has worked with a long-term financial planning consultant to target non-levy funds to pay for the increase in compensation. Knapp said, “We have identified that there is easily $10 million that we would have available—not from our levy—that we could take advantage of.”

As one example of a funding source, Knapp gave the $3.7 million in supplemental LIT (local income tax) distribution that came to the city in May.

Knapp told the city council: “The goal would be to find a way to implement as much as we can as quickly as we can, to alleviate frankly, the pain points for our staff and to improve retention and hiring.”

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