Thumbnail photo by Paul Critz Norma Williams summed up SEIU 1021’s assessment of the Gallagher report in four words: We told you so. The president of the Del Norte County Employees Association told supervisors Tuesday that the results of Gallagher’s compensation analysis — which showed that the county’s base salary is 10% below the market median though its overall compensation package is 2.1% above the market median — is nothing new. Following a subsequent presentation from Human Resources Director Kerri Vue, who stated that there were 121 staff vacancies out of a total of 482 positions, Williams called for an across-the-board cost of living adjustment. She also urged them to address substandard salaries by ensuring the positions’ pay is in line with the market rate. “Since the county is not offering a living wage, [departments] cannot attract sufficient applicants,” Williams said. “This leads to key departments being short staffed and current employees having to take on excessive caseloads and unsustainable levels of responsibilities.” Gallagher’s compensation and structural analysis, and their recommendations, also fell short of expectations among county supervisors. District 2 Supervisor Valerie Starkey said the study didn’t include the analysis of the county’s staffing structure that she was hoping for. Her colleague, District 1 Supervisor Darrin Short asked consultants Kari Mercer and Georg Krammer why they didn’t use a more consistent data point to compare job classifications internally. “I was hoping to be able to look at our whole county, like how the hierarchy is and our number of employees and how that’s working relatable to others to see where we sat, and I didn’t get that,” Short said. “Having used those inconsistent data points and now having this overlap in our hierarchy is going to make it really difficult for the Board to go forward with our bargaining groups. We want to get this fixed, but if we have a data point that’s telling us there’s an employee that’s severely under paid, but they overlap the supervisor above them, then how can we do that?” Instead of going with a compensation structure Gallagher recommended, Del Norte County officials will take the market data and internal recommendations and create a master compensation schedule that starts with the entry-level range, County Administrative Officer Neal Lopez told supervisors. “I’ve discussed this with both of our representative groups, mid-management and SEIU and plan to discuss it with SEA as well so they know what’s going to happen with this information going forward,” Lopez said, referring to the Sheriff’s Employees Association. “Going forward it will be the management team that develops this based on the benchmarks and relationship information provided by Gallagher.” In their presentation, Mercer and Krammer said their analysis compared Del Norte County to similar counties. The eight counties the Gallagher report compares Del Norte to includes Amador, Glenn, Humboldt, Inyo, Lake, Mariposa, Plumas and Siskiyou. Krammer said he and Mercer also had to determine what jobs they had to survey. “Our typical approach is not to survey every single job — we call them job classifications — but to go through a benchmarking process where we typically select about 60 to 65% of all the county’s job classifications as benchmarks,” he said. “These are the jobs we went out to the market to survey…. And that market data for those benchmark classifications creates the anchor we use to anchor the county’s compensation plan to the market.” In addition to base salaries, Krammer and Mercer also took the county’s overall benefits package, including retirement, health insurance and paid leave, into account during its analysis. Mercer said she and Krammer compared that information to the data they had gleaned from the counties they compared Del Norte to. This includes looking at memorandums of understanding for different bargaining groups and classifications, organizational charts, budget documents and salary schedules. They also followed up just before publishing the study to ensure the data is up-to-date, Mercer said. According to Mercer, Del Norte County officials asked Gallagher to compare base salaries, though the firm often advises clients to use the point of comparison that is the most competitive. “You do have around 45% of your benchmark classifications that are below market,” Mercer told supervisors. “You have just over 5% that are above. You did have about 25 to 30% of the benchmark classes where we have insufficient data.” About 20% of the county’s job classifications are either 5% above or 5% below the market median, Mercer said. Anywhere within that 5% below or above threshold is considered generally competitive, she said. It was the comparison of the relationships between positions within Del Norte County that caused the challenge. This includes comparing positions that are within the same job family or career ladder “that should have clear relationships to each other,” Krammer said. “In some cases, the ranges will have five [salary] steps and in other cases, the ranges will have eight steps, and that’s what the current county structure is,” he said. “The challenge we’re talking about comes from looking internally within the organization to try to establish those internal relationships.” Mercer said the county’s “less structured” format for its compensation structure compared to other counties made using market data to make recommendations challenging. Noting that there was overlap in job classifications, Mercer said she and Krammer used the maximum salary for comparison rather than entry-level steps, which is what Del Norte County had relied on. However, according to Starkey, there’s not a consistent top step in Del Norte County because the salary ranges differ across its three bargaining groups. Some go through steps A through E and others go through steps A through H before they reach longevity, she said. “What I wanted was for them to just give us that entry-level step because everybody has that and that’s consistent,” she told Redwood Voice Community News on Friday. “We got the option to look at the totality of the compensation package and we were like no we want to look at just [our] base salary. We feel that’s the most important thing when trying to hire and retain employees.” Meanwhile, according to Vue’s presentation, SEIU 1021 has the largest number of vacant positions of the county’s three main bargaining groups. According to Vue, of a total of 306 positions with SEIU 1021, 104 are vacant. This means the vacancy rate within SEIU 1021 is 34%, Williams told supervisors. She also pointed out that while the county’s overall base salary is 10% below market rate, 85 out of the 160 job classifications surveyed were SEIU 1021 positions. “We estimate that overall, salaries for SEIU-only classifications are 10% below average against the comparator counties,” she said. Positions that have salaries that are below market rate include certified public health nurse at 12.6%, client support specialist at 23.3%, District Attorney investigator at 27.1% and Behavioral Health program coordinator at 36.6%. A 2016 compensation analysis showed that overall county salaries were 10.83% under market median, Williams said, and in 2022, another study found that on average all county salaries were 11.65% under market median. She also pointed out that while the Gallagher consultants stated that 5% below market median was competitive, this means that “half the people doing the same job in other counties get paid more.” “Del Norte should aspire for more than mediocrity,” she said. “If I go to the grocery store and try to pay 5% less than the groceries are worth, the cashier doesn’t say good enough. We urge the Board to move all employees up to the full market wage.”