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Staff outlines three methods to benchmark city pay
Summary
Staff described three options for benchmarking pay: a statewide 'shoot the moon' TechNet pull, a Wasatch Front regional set, and a selected-peer-city comparison (matched by population, budget, employee counts); councilors asked for an apples-to-apples presentation.
City staff explained multiple ways to benchmark pay and asked councilors which scenarios they wanted run. Staff described a "shoot the moon" approach (pulling all Utah entities from TechNet), a Wasatch Front regional set that includes nearby counties, and a narrower set of selected peer cities matched on population, budget and employee counts.
"Once that data all gets compiled, you may have then instead of 1 piece of data on a police officer for Riverdale, you may have 20 police officers from 20 different agencies, and we would take that average, and that would become the number that we would benchmark off of is the average of all of those," the staff member said. Councilors discussed trade-offs: a larger pool averages out extremes but may mask specialized cities; a narrowly selected peer group can match services more closely but risks accusations of cherry-picking. Staff will run the three scenarios and provide the analysis this summer.
