Writer: Parish Howard
Published November 17, 2022
The Augusta Chronicle
Around 170 of Jefferson County’s 175 employees should begin seeing significant increases to their next paychecks. Commissioners voted unanimously Nov. 3 to follow recommendations from a year-long classification and compensation study and enact the first phase of a plan that will amount to an increase of nearly $520,000 to its already $6 million salary budget.
“We’ve been working on this a long time and we hope it will help you retain your employees and help you hire new employees,” Chairman Mitchell McGraw told the county department heads who attended the called meeting. “This isn’t something we just threw together. This came from intense study by the University of Georgia and it was done by people who have a proven track record of doing salary studies for people a lot bigger than us.”
“We’ve been working on this a long time and we hope it will help you retain your employees and help you hire new employees,” Chairman Mitchell McGraw told the county department heads who attended the called meeting. “This isn’t something we just threw together. This came from intense study by the University of Georgia and it was done by people who have a proven track record of doing salary studies for people a lot bigger than us.”
County Administrator Jerry Coalson said that the commissioners have been working for some time to improve benefits and increase salaries across the board to make local positions more competitive with surrounding counties.
“You’ve all seen problems trying to get and hire employees because of who we are in competition with,” Coalson said to everyone in the meeting.
Coalson later confirmed that the increases largely came from seeing deputies, jailors and correctional officers, positions that together make up about half of the county’s total employees, leave local employment for more money.
“They tell you that it’s about the money,” Coalson said. “We had already bumped deputies up to like $17 an hour and we knew we probably needed to be around $19 to be competitive. I think jailors needed to be around $18 to be competitive.”
With the raises approved, Coalson said that deputies’ pay will likely go up $3,000 to $5,000 a year, based on longevity and corrections officers will go up $3,000 to $4,000.
“We have more people in this one category than any other,” Coalson said. “We’re always hiring and losing people. All of that training, on-boarding and off-boarding takes a ton of time and money.”
The study worked with all of the county’s departments and most employees to survey all of the county’s positions and turn those positions into job descriptions. It then took data from surrounding counties, the Department of Labor and the Bureau of Labor Statistics and ranked the positions considering the difficulty and education required for each. It assigned starting pay scales and then starting to account for longevity.
“We have employees who have been here for a long, long time, and we had to set up a process for identifying how you move people across the chart,” Coalson said.
Coalson said that to bring Jefferson County’s employee’s salaries in line and make their positions competitive with surrounding counties, it would take an overall increase of about $1.8 million a year.
“We knew from the day the board approved this (study) that we were not going to be able to implement this all at one time,” Coalson said.
The Carl Vinson Institute provided the county with four different options for implementation, ranging from doing it all at once to more gradual options.
Thursday the commissioners voted to go with an option that provides the bulk of the increase, that nearly $520,000 up front and a tentative plan to implement additional but smaller increases over the next four years.
Knowing this study was in the works and that it would likely be implemented late this year, Coalson said the county set aside around $300,000 in budgeted contingency funds and is prepared to absorb this increased expense.
These salary increases will not include constitutional officers, bailiffs, state court judges or the state court solicitor as the salaries for these positions are set either by the grand jury or by local legislation approved by the general assembly.
Commissioner Wayne Davis moved to make the new pay rates active beginning on Oct. 31, 2022. Commissioner Gonice Davis seconded the motion and it was passed unanimously.
“This is a plan that sets us comparable to other counties anywhere around us with our size,” McGraw said. “For counties our size and maybe a little larger, I think this gives us opportunity to hold on to good people and hire good people. We have appreciated what y’all have done, elected officials, this county is financially in the best shape it’s ever been in and it’s because of y’all doing your job. This board is committed to supporting y’all and your employees. We didn’t want to just give raises here and there just to retain people for a little while longer, we wanted something that could be imbedded into our policy.”
The additional increases that are planned for 2024 through 2027, expected to be around $380,000 a year, will be a part of the budgeting process for each of those years individually, Coalson later explained. Each increase will be based on funding availability.
“Those are the targets we are trying to hit,” he said. “If an issue with funding comes up or there is a big change in the state of Georgia or the cost of living goes up, they will consider that then. We have some other options.”
There are a handful of county positions that were found to be currently in line with other pay scales, Coalson said. These were mostly more recent hires.
