Pay increases, Overtime

3/18/2010

I noticed that there is a budgeted 3% pay increase for employees this year.  The City Clerk has pulled a 140% pay increase in the last 10 year pay increase period and has even commented at one time that she felt she deserved a larger increase.  Instead of giving an increase, it would appear that some employees should being taking a pay cut.  Council member Jensen even stated that a pay decrease wouldn't be legal which isn't true.

Many of our officials don't appear to concern themselves with the public's best interest, they take pay increases while the rest of society suffers.  Elected officials in Wright County took increases with the exception of the County Commissioners.  Elected officials in Washington have an automatic pay increase in an attempt to decrease the controversy.

The council recently had a workshop and it appears that there is a possible Local Government Aid reduction of $114,000.  It is also noted that additional revenue is needed.  The items listed for consideration under Revenue are Street Light Fee, sell the fiber optics, and Municipal Liquor.

Another item on the workshop agenda was about marketing residential lots in Montrose with one option being Tax Abatement.  The city could ""rebate" all or a portion (e.g. 75%) of the City's share of the new taxes generated from a new house to owners of new housing." The city could set limits that the house has to be a minimum value "ensuring a higher quality housing stock and require home owners retain and/or reside in the home for 5 years to ensure this program isn't used for speculative housing."

Overtime
Regarding "overtime" in Montrose, the Model overtime policy from the League of Minnesota Cities states that "Vacation, sick leave and paid holidays do not count toward “hours worked”."  The Mayor serves on the League of Minnesota Cities.  Why does Montrose still count this as time worked?  This was brought up around 6 months ago and again at the Taxation meeting in December.  The Mayor responded the second time saying that it hadn't been discussed yet.

What occurs is Employees comp time out at 1 1/2 times over 40 hours that includes Vacation, Holiday, or Sick pay.  In one week if an employee worked 36 hours and took 8 hours of vacation for a total of 44 hours, they would bank 6 hours of Comp time!  When taking Comp time, I haven't seen a week where they went over 40 hours total. Per the policy, comp time doesn't count as time worked.

The council also referred an improper pay increase to the Personnel committee however it hasn't been resolved after 1 year.  Also, the city still has been paying 3 people to supervise the Public Works department since 2007 at an additional cost of $10,000 a year.  At the last council meeting, Council member Jensen only seemed concerned about spending $1000 on an engineering cost estimate and voted no to approving it.  Why wasn't the Public Works issue been brought up?  Is the Mayor not bringing it up for consensus reasons?


It was also brought up at the Taxation meeting as to why it was proposed that the Commissioners not be paid the small stipend they receive for meetings while the Mayor milked the special meeting pay.  Mayor Kauffman responded that the council's jobs was more important.  I noticed an individual shaking their head it what appeared to be disbelief.