The Odessa City Council learned Tuesday night that, overall, the city is 11% below where it should be when it comes to employee salaries.
Michael Burton and Catherine Thorpe from Gallagher Human Resources and Compensation Practice presented their preliminary compensation study findings to the council during its work session meeting. Additional data will be provided Oct. 28.
Thorpe said 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.
“We had three weeks for them to all provide their responses and we received a 34% response rate, which is actually very high. If we get 25% that’s pretty good from our perspective of response percentage,” Thorpe said. “Their incentive to do that is they will get a complimentary copy of just the custom survey piece, nothing else specific to this Odessa study.”
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.
“Which isn’t bad, it’s still relatively competitive, but you definitely have some gaps that we need to address,” Burton said.
Mayor Javier Joven said that two years ago, when the council began “going down this rabbit hole,” he thought it was a “futile effort” to do any comparisons because the city’s policies and procedures were stuck in the ‘80s.
“I thought that we were just throwing money, good money down the drain because we still had the glaring problem,” Joven said.
In addition to creating new classifications, the Gallagher representatives said they’ll work on a plan to address compression and performance management.
In other matters, the council informally agreed to issue a second request for proposals for on-call electrical, HVAC/plumbing, general contractor and landscape services.
According to materials provided to the city, an RFP for general contractors went out in July, but no bids were received. Staff discovered the insurance requirements posed a financial burden on small businesses so adjustments have been made.
Director of Risk Management Yvette Griffin believes having contractors on-call will save the city time and money by limiting the need for additional meetings, the need to prepare additional RFPs and the need to place additional legal notices in the Odessa American.
During the council’s regular 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.
Finance Director Kaylie Banda reminded the council they decided not to include funding in next year’s budget for positions that were vacant as of Aug. 9.
“We want directors to hire in a strategic manner and in a needs-based way so part of their duties is to provide a justification for review,” Banda said.
As a result, the 11 positions she was asking them to fund were approved by human resources, the budget manager and City Manager John Beckmeyer, she said.
The council members also awarded a contract to WGI to design a new parking garage at Lee Avenue and Third Street, although the exact amount of the contract is not yet known. It’s expected to be $200,000-$250,000.
Strategic Development and Policy Manager Jeff Fisher told the council a committee settled on WGI because of their qualifications, but also after looking at such things as efficiency and emergency preparedness.
”We wanted to make sure that if there was ever an emergency or catastrophic event, (Odessa Police Department) cars could get out quickly and efficiently,” Fisher said.
WGI also said they could design space for micro-retail stores and things that could bring in additional revenue, such as bike storage, long-term parking storage, night and evening parking, he said.
At a later point the council will have to decide if they’d like to hire WGI or another company to actually construct the garage.
The city council also heard from three citizens during the meeting. Dallas Kennedy criticized the city for placing the call to the public portion of the meeting to the end of the meeting when it used to be at the beginning. He said it was inconvenient for citizens, who might not have the time or inclination to stay for the entire meeting.
Precinct Chairman Ronnie Lewis took the council to task for allowing City Manager John Beckmeyer to sign an open-ended contract with TGAA, noting Joven, Swanner and Matta have conflicts of interest.
Also, Bill Cleaver, who described himself as “hotter than fish grease” criticized certain members of council for approving a three-year contract for Beckmeyer that allows him to be paid out if he leaves the city early, regardless of the circumstances.
“No city in the great state of Texas has a city manager with a three-year no-fault contract,” Cleaver said. “I would also like to know what two people put this on the April agenda and did they pull the terms of the contract agreements out of their yahoo?”
