Barrow Journal

Barrow County Sheriff’s Office and Detention Center employees would get around a 3.4-percent pay increase next fiscal year under a preliminary recommended county budget, but not the full amount Sheriff Jud Smith was requesting.
The county board of commissioners held the first of a series of budget workshops on April 10 as the county works on crafting, and adopting by June, a budget for FY2019 which begins July 1.
County manager Mike Renshaw presented the board with a report on a pay classification and salary study for the sheriff’s office conducted by Condrey and Associates, Inc. The firm compared pay schedules for the BCSO against 20 other law enforcement agencies in surrounding counties and municipalities and then proposed a couple of plans to make the sheriff’s office more competitive with the comparable agencies.
The plan recommended by Renshaw would increase the employees’ salaries by 3.4 percent and have an estimated $315,482 impact on the proposed budget, and it would place the department’s pay scale slightly above the mean of the comparable labor market, which “should prove to be effective in attracting and retaining a quality workforce,” the firm said in the report.
The firm also recommended annual salary adjustments across the board, when market conditions dictate, in addition to any performance-based increases.
However, Renshaw did not recommend a one-time equity adjustment the firm suggested to counteract pay compression (position salaries being grouped closely together regardless of length or quality of service). That adjustment would have an estimated $718,049 impact on the proposed budget. Smith had requested a full implementation of the plan, but Renshaw said that would be difficult to accomplish and stay within the budget without any kind of millage increase.
See more in the April 18 edition of the Barrow News-Journal.