During a quick special meeting Tuesday afternoon, the Odessa City Council unanimously voted to spend just over $4 million filling more than 50 positions throughout the city.
The city council slashed several positions during its budget process with an eye toward only filling positions once department heads establish a need for them.
On Tuesday, Finance Director Kaylie Banda said there are numerous positions that need to be filled in the following departments: animal control, Odessa Police Department, Odessa Fire Rescue, engineering and streets.
Although the council approved the funding of several positions during a recent regular meeting, Banda said some of the positions she was advocating for this week “got caught up in the work flow.”
During that meeting, council members voted unanimously to fund five fire inspector positions, a building services maintenance tech, a solid waste worker, two solid waste drivers, an equipment services parts tech and an equipment services tire tech, for a total cost of $761,000.
City Manager John Beckmeyer said if the positions are not filled, they could be stripped from the budget again. He said before doing so, however, they’ll make sure there isn’t a problem with the wording of the job description or pay.
Gallagher Human Resources and Compensation Practice is in the process of doing a compensation study for the city.
The firm recently told the council the city is 11% below where it should be when it comes to employee salaries.
Michael Burton and Catherine Thorpe from Gallagher told the council the city has 381 different job titles and when comparing these jobs to jobs in other communities or industries, they made sure the job was at least 80% comparable.
Overall, they reached out to 45 organizations and 28 of them were other government agencies. They also went to some oil and gas companies.
Burton explained they consider a salary to be “highly competitive” if it’s around 5% of the market salary and a salary is “competitive” if it’s around 10%.
Ideally, an organization is better than 50% of their competitors when it comes to salaries, but some cities strive to be better than 75%, Burton said.
They found that animal control employees are around 11% below the 50th percentile, but finance is 22% below the market, he said.
“Some departments you’re going pretty well. Purchasing you’re relatively competitive in, your water waste collection. If you look at police and fire, the actual fire department, the actual people who climb ladders and put out fires, they’re fine,” Burton said.
Overall, the city is 11% below market, he said.
