Pay Raises, Suspended License, Bank Settlement

8/26/10

All Montrose City Staff got a 3% raise this year at the August meeting.  Part of the selling feature is they didn't get a raise for 2 years and they saved the city allot of money.  If they didn't cut spending the city would have had difficulty meeting its obligations as many saw in the private sector.

If employees were to get raises based off of the established program, their increases would have been about 1/2 of what they just got.  COLA for Social Security recipients is 0 for the last 2 years.  Maybe staff saw that and used the "2 years without raises" campaign to get a bigger increase.  All you have to look at is the 140% increase the City Clerk managed to get from about 1998 to 2008 and the large increases in 2008 to see where some of their interests are, which was when Charlie Nelson was Mayor [and Sharon Knodel].

It used to be in the public sector you got paid less but got job security and a pension.  Now they have found a way to get all 3 of these.



Suspended License
It also came to the council's attention in July that the Public Works Director Sean had his license suspended for several months.  I'm not sure if the council did or will do anything regarding this.  They had a closed session July 12 for performance reviews of Sean and Barb and the only remark from this is that the reviews were very positive.

Bank Settlement
Montrose also recently settled with a bank on a development.  When they settled I believe they understood the work to be complete.  They found out after when someone drove through the subdivision that the road was missing its final wear layer which will cost $25k. The bank has agreed to give $12k of that amount.  This would seem to fall into the City Engineer's responsibility that this was done, maybe they should cover the rest of the cost?