Pima County employees set for pay boost after study shows discrepancies

Nearly every Pima County employee will receive a raise after a more than year-long, methodical study found one of the region’s largest employers inadequately classifies and pays its workers.

The Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to spend $9.5 million to reorganize employees into new salary grades and job classifications after an outside firm found about a third of county employees earn less than those in similar positions throughout the state.

The board approved the $380,000 study, conducted by CBIZ Talent and Compensation Solutions, in June 2022. The last in-depth study of the county’s compensation systems occurred in 1957, according to County Administrator Jan Lesher.

More than 60 years later, the CBIZ report showed the county underpays its employees compared to market rates, has no definitive system for adjustments to employee pay and routinely hires people at the minimum of the pay scale, creating an “outdated and overly complex” classification and pay system, Lesher said.

The unstructured methodology has not only exacerbated turnover rates and increased vacancies, it’s affected employees’ bottom lines.

Rising costs financially strain employees as they retain the same salary, said Karl Wagner, an employee with the county’s Community and Workforce Development Department and chair of Pima County’s AFSCME division, the designated union for county employees.

“It was surprising to see that number (of jobs below market rates), but then, on second thought, I wasn’t, because I see so many people struggling just with the cost of everything,” he said. Wagner specified his views don’t represent those of the AFSCME organization.

The board’s Tuesday vote implements what the county is calling phase one of salary adjustments, where workers are sorted into new, more specific job titles in updated salary classifications that are competitive within the market. For those earning wages below their job titles’ salary grade, they’ll move to the minimum salary of the wages assigned to their new pay range.

In August, supervisors will vote on the exact set of salary adjustments Lesher will recommend after human resources officials compile the changes and determine the cost. The goal is to raise wages enough to meet the middle of the market for similar positions in the region.

“When you think about how we’ve adjusted the classifications or who got raises, it’s clearly taken us decades to get into the kind of mess some of those positions were in,” Lesher said. “That was my great fear, is that in a lot of this, we simply were not hitting the market …. We don’t need to be setting any records, but we need to at least keep up with our competitors.”

“Low pay” for “high-stress” work

The county’s government has felt the impact of the Great Resignation — the economic trend the U.S. began seeing in early 2021 where people voluntarily leave their jobs amid low unemployment levels and higher demands for labor rights. The lack of a policy outlining best practices for pay hasn’t helped.

The turnover rate has steadily increased over past years, with the last fiscal year seeing 22% turnover throughout the organization. A healthy turnover rate, Human Resources Director Cathy Bohland told the board Tuesday, “is anywhere between 5 and 10%,” which would “show that the organization is functioning well and able to provide and meet our business needs.”

Further destabilizing its workforce, the county employs more than 6,800 people with a median age of 50. In speaking with department heads, Board of Supervisors Chair Adelita Grijalva said most reported at least 50% of their employees are at or near retirement.

“How do you plan for leadership succession and making sure that you can keep that institutional experience in the organization when you don’t have people that are taking the entry-level positions? All of that is a concern,” she said.

Employees leaving the county have contributed to a vacancy rate of about 13% as of July 16, leaving key departments such as the County Attorney’s Office, the health department and facilities management without a full slate of workers to provide constituent services.

Pima County Attorney Laura Conover said her office continually struggles to hire employees performing some of the most demanding work.

It’s hard to hire “entry-level staff taking very sensitive calls,” or “redactors, who are in dark cubicles, reviewing traumatic footage, and trying to protect private, sensitive information for victims,” Conover said, “because the jobs are very low pay for very professional, high stress, delicate work.”

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The CBIZ study found 81% of the county’s job classifications earn less than the market rate of similar job titles in the region. As part of the first phase of implementing a new compensation structure, the county will expand from 956 job classifications to 1,021 “to better define an employee’s position and duties,” Lesher said.

Starting with the pay period beginning Sept. 10, “the vast majority of county employees will see a (salary) adjustment,” Lesher said. It’s unclear for now precisely what those adjustments will look like until she brings a recommendation to the board in August outlining the changes. Key issues such as compression and budget restraints also have to be worked out.

Conover hopes the CBIZ study is amended to take into account new salaries for Tucson’s attorneys the City Council approved in June, the same month the CBIZ study came out. The city attorneys who mainly work on misdemeanor cases are making more than county attorneys working on felony-based cases, Conover said.

“At the end of the day, public safety will receive what we pay for,” she said.

Compression issues

The board has approved piecemeal across-the-board and department-specific raises in past years, including nearly $20 million in staff raises as part of last fiscal year’s budget with larger percentage increases for those making less. The raises gave an 8.5% raise for those making $35,000 a year or less, 5% for those making $35,001-$75,000, 3% for those making $75,001-$150,000 and 1% for those making more than $150,001.

But percentage-based raises can compound compression issues. For those who’ve been working with the county for years, a less-experienced employee could easily catch up to them when moving to a higher pay grade.

“Compression is my biggest concern once everything is adjusted …. Other people have been in the job for a long time, they got a little bump, but now they’re much closer together with somebody who’s been working there less time,” Grijalva said.

Lesher said aiming for the midpoint of the new salary ranges in the new compensation structure will help address this. Plus, $5 million of the $9.5 million the board approved is earmarked for compression to provide raises to employees who may not jump a pay grade but still need compensation to ensure their wages align with experience and job tasks.

“It’s a very complicated process to look at the roughly 7,000 employees that the county has to reclassify and to then try to get the pay rates up,” Wagner from AFSCME said. “I believe it’s a step in the right direction. But I think there needs to be a continued effort.”

Taxpayers absorb “astronomical raises”

The raises come at a significant cost to sustain over time, Lesher noted. “It is going to be very, very difficult for taxpayers to absorb the kinds of astronomical raises and things that are coming on,” she said.

Lesher said the board won’t go over the about $15 million it approved to implement the CBIZ study’s recommendations this fiscal year, leaving a finite amount of money to spread across thousands of county employees.

County leaders are considering enacting a cap on raises to control spending. Instead of implementing automatic pay bumps in the tens of thousands, “we would be looking at setting a cap, maybe $10,000,” Lesher said.

“I would rather that we gave everybody some of it, rather than, if we give everybody some of those very large raises, there won’t be enough to cover all who need it,” she said.

The county also has to ensure it can finance salaries in future years while budgeting enough to account for future raises. Lesher said staff will bring a sustainability plan to the board in August to account for future years.

For Grijalva, rewarding employees for their years of service is a key part of the plan.

“I think a thank you to our employees for their dedication and staying with Pima County is something that’s going to be really important for morale and for reducing the number of vacancies and amount of turnover,” she said.

The county provides increased vacation time based on years of service and is looking into other incentives like telecommuting policies and pet insurance, Lesher said.

“But in the final analysis, what really I think is bringing people to work is looking at what that salary is. It might not be the only driver, but it’s clearly a critical one,” she said.