Dade City staff presented a pay-study report and a proposed pay plan during a city commission budget workshop that would raise the city’s base hourly pay to $15, change pay ranges across job classes and set a two‑year cadence for future pay studies.

The plan was developed by HR staff after comparing Dade City job classifications with neighboring municipalities and running a range calculation for minimums, midpoints and maximums. “I was asked to perform the pay study,” HR staff member Miss Dyson told the commission, and described collecting pay plans from New Port Richey, Port Richey, Zephyrhills, Brooksville and Newberry. Dyson said she set the proposed base at $15 to align with state minimum‑wage increases and to avoid repeating the study next year.

The proposal would: set $15 as the city’s base hourly rate (the city’s current base is $13), adjust each pay grade with 5% differentials between grades, compute midpoints as averages between minimum and maximum, and apply a years‑of‑service calculation to reduce pay compression. Staff described three color‑coded groups in the spreadsheet they circulated: employees who would gain most from a 3% COLA, employees who would see larger increases under the pay study itself, and employees whose years of service moved them up within a revised range.

Why it matters: the plan affects pay for all municipal employees and is the staffing‑cost component of the FY 2025–26 budget the commission is preparing. Commissioners raised objections about competitive hiring, compression between new hires and long‑tenured employees and whether the city should set an entry‑level base higher than the minimum required by state law.

Commission discussion focused on two policy choices: whether to set the base higher than $15 and how to treat cost‑of‑living adjustments (COLA) for employees who have not yet completed a year with the city. Mayor Pro Tem Woodard and other commissioners pressed staff for clarity on which titles and how many employees would be affected, and on whether the spreadsheet shown correctly reflected employee‑specific pay, COLA and years‑of‑service calculations.

On the minimum wage timing, Dyson said the city’s current schedule places the minimum at $14 for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 and the state‑mandated $15 minimum by 2026, and that the proposed pay plan adopts $15 now to avoid redoing the study in 12 months. “We don’t want to lose people, right? We want to retain them, the good ones,” Dyson said.

Several commissioners argued for targeted adjustments to entry‑level jobs that remain hard to fill, rather than across‑the‑board increases, and asked staff to identify vacancies and recruitment difficulty by department. Police Chief (name not specified) told the commission the public‑safety information officer (dispatch) classification and some police and utilities roles are especially hard to fill and recommended higher starting pay for those positions. Commissioner Church and others urged attention to retention for lower‑paid positions and to job descriptions and evaluation tools linked to merit increases.

Policy direction and outcome: the commission indicated consensus to adopt the proposed pay plan as the baseline for the upcoming budget and to revisit figures next year, with one explicit personnel policy direction: employees hired within 365 days of Oct. 1 will not receive that October’s COLA. Staff recorded that direction and said it would be incorporated into policy language and the pay plan documents.

What’s next: staff said they will finalize the pay plan and the accompanying spreadsheet for inclusion in the draft budget and that they will continue working with department heads on job descriptions and position‑specific details. Dyson told commissioners she could re‑run the calculations if the commission opted for a different base rate.

The commission’s discussion also included an agreement to conduct pay‑plan reviews on a recurring schedule (staff recommended every two years).