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Budget committee split on raises, staffing and ways to reduce payroll pressure
Summary
Members debated whether to scale raises by income or apply uniform COLA increases as payroll consumes roughly 60% of the budget; staff and some members warned that reducing raises for higher-paid technical staff risks turnover and higher long-term costs.
Committee member (S3) opened a wide-ranging discussion about payroll, noting the city's budget is roughly 60% payroll and asking whether raises should be uniform across the workforce or scaled depending on an employee's current pay level.
"If someone's at a hundred percent of the median household income, maybe we do 1% rather than 3%," Committee member (S3) said, describing one approach. Others pushed back: Committee member (S7) said inflation affects all workers and warned that lower raises for specialized, highly paid technical staff could drive turnover that is costlier to the city in the long run.
Staff and several members proposed alternatives to across-the-board cuts, such as reducing discretionary overtime, limiting nonessential service hours (for example trimming overnight snowplow overtime), and better communicating current staff workload and savings from employees wearing multiple hats. Committee members asked staff to quantify overtime and expendable hours as potential savings before considering reductions to base wages.
No formal pay policy was adopted at the meeting. The committee directed staff to provide more detailed payroll breakdowns, options for differentiated merit or COLA structures, and an estimate of the fiscal impact and turnover risk of different raise scenarios before the tentative budget is finalized.
