GREENFIELD — The heads of Hancock County government departments are aiming to get raises for their employees, following the example of Sheriff Brad Burkhart. After the county council agreed to form a committee studying the possibility of raises for public safety employees, it also formed another to look into raises for the county’s other departments.
Some department heads have strong views on how their employees should be compensated. At the most recent meeting of the county budget committee, Prosecutor Brent Eaton said he wanted the ability to give merit raises to his employees to reward them for work well done.
“If you only have negative incentives for people, they’re generally only going to do the minimum they need to not get fired,” Eaton said.
Eaton said the salaries his staff receives are significantly lower than what they could be paid in other counties, or in comparable work outside of municipal government. Eaton said offering merit pay to his employees makes sense, noting that he is not asking for additional money, only to reallocate funds his department already receives.
“If we’re going to be a leader in the community, we need to find ways to increase value and efficiency in what we do,” he said.
Council member Bill Bolander said he hopes the council will be able to arrive at a solution that’s equitable across all departments of the county government. The budget committee has not yet reached an agreement on how large salary increases should be and how they should be implemented. In addition to merit pay, longevity pay based on the length of an employee’s career has been discussed; so has the idea of introducing raises gradually over a period of two or more years.
“There’s such a difference between offices, and I think we need to standardize that,” Bolander said.
Greg Guerrettaz, the county’s financial adviser, said he has received numbers on a proposed raise for public safety employees and is waiting for numbers on the county’s other employees. Guerrettaz will conduct a study of how the raises would affect the county’s financial sustainability, and he said it’s likely an increase would need to be distributed across multiple years.
He will also compare the county’s salaries to those in other communities, though he said those that are most comparable are not necessarily the ones located close to Hancock County. Marshall County, located close to Chicago, is one comparison with a similar population.
“We’re not using Hamilton County, for example,” Guerrettaz said. “It’s too expensive.”
Other departments in the county government are also hoping the process will result in greater compensation for their employees. The county government has asked every department head to fill out a form stating what they believe salaries should be for each role they supervise.
Hancock County Auditor Debra Carnes said that, as a department head, she hopes the county can find the employees in every department who are not receiving a competitive salary and can work toward compensating them more fairly.
“We don’t want to do anything that would be detrimental to the taxpayers, but we’ve got employees that are doing great work,” she said. “…They deserve to be compensated for the good work they do and the amount of work that they do.”
Carnes said that some members of her administrative staff have been contacted by the governments of other counties looking to hire them away for increased salaries.
Hancock County Clerk Lisa Lofgreen said she has not had to replace employees during her three years in office, but is currently looking to hire new staff members and will be curious to see whether the available pay is an obstacle. Lofgreen said she was glad to see the county council solicit feedback from all the department heads on the issue of pay raises.
“I really appreciate the council getting together and trying to put together a pay schedule,” Lofgreen said.