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Council open to broadening compensation benchmark beyond Riverdale
Summary
At a brief South Ogden council work session, staff asked whether the city should expand its compensation-comparison group beyond Riverdale to better reflect the labor market; councilors asked staff to return with three scenario analyses this summer.
South Ogden's work session on compensation centered on whether the city should continue using Riverdale as its sole benchmark for pay comparisons or expand to a broader market. A staff member told councilors the item was "more of an ask" than an update and asked if the council would be open to looking beyond Riverdale for this year's external market analysis.
"As as we've been digging into compensation, I've been have been trying to become more familiar with our process and, how, we compensate here and the compensation policy that is in the policy and procedure manual," the staff member said, explaining the limitations of relying on a single comparator. Councilors agreed they wanted comparative data and asked staff to return with three sets of numbers: the current Riverdale comparison, a statewide "shoot the moon" dataset using all Utah TechNet entries, and a Wasatch Front/selected-peer-city dataset matched by population, budget and employee counts. Staff said it would take additional work and planned to return with the analyses this summer.
The discussion noted practical data limitations: staff said Riverdale no longer posts some position-level data on TechNet, which complicates one-to-one matches and forces regression to fill gaps. Councilors emphasized the need for a transparent selection methodology to avoid perceptions of cherry-picking which cities are included.
