After years of slowly climbing skyward, the pay rates in Clark County’s fire halls, city halls and schools are leveling off.
Of 775 of the county’s best-paid government workers, only a third got a raise in the last year, according to The Columbian’s second annual
survey of local public salaries.
One in six took a pay cut.
Even so, the size of the biggest raises — 8 percent for some police officers in La Center and Battle Ground, for example, or 4 percent for most managers at Clark Regional Wastewater District — meant that average pay kept growing, as it has in the private sector.
To search The Columbian’s 1,000-record database of the top-paid 20 workers at each of 40 local government agencies over the last three years, visit http://www.columbian.com/datacenter/.
Since February 2009, the average public worker in the database got a 1.1 percent raise. That’s down from 5 percent the year before, but it’s twice the local inflation rate in 2009, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Nationally, private workers’ pay rose 1.4 percent in 2009, BLS figures show.
The searchable, sortable, linkable list of the 20 highest-paid employees at each of 40 local government agencies, compiled using Washington’s Public Records Act, will be available all year at http://www.columbian.com/datacenter/.
The higher you rank, the less likely you were to get a raise. Only three of the county’s top 50 public workers — Clark Public Utilities Engineering Director Cal Morris, who makes $170,196; Port of Vancouver Operations Director Alastair Smith, who makes $138,031; and Washington State University Vancouver accounting professor Debra Sanders, who makes $135,500 — saw raises at all. At the 40 local agencies that have full-time workers, only seven executives got raises; four took cuts.
In order to compare so many agencies, The Columbian’s database does not track perhaps the biggest difference between public and private workers: Benefits like overtime, paid leave and medical insurance, which are typically more generous in the public sector.
Sinking public salaries scaring away executives in training
Counting benefits, the average state and local government worker made $39.25 an hour nationwide in 2008, compared to $27.35 in the private sector. But that comparison, reported this month by USA Today from BLS research, may be skewed by the higher skills required of the average government worker.
The cost of public workers’ pension and health benefits may actually be bigger threats to government budgets than workers’ pay, said state Sen. Joe Zarelli, R-Ridgefield, the top Republican on the Senate’s taxing and spending committee.
“These are two issues that are large kind of elephants hanging around that have got to be dealt with,” Zarelli said.
Cuts hit schools
Because Washington’s Legislature answered last year’s plummeting sales tax receipts by slashing payments to school districts and universities, local educators took some of the hardest hits.
Many public school teachers, for example, took 0.5 percent cuts to their base pay this year, finishing at $64,531 for the top bracket.
School executives lost salary, too. WSU Vancouver Chancellor Hal Dengerink, the county’s second-highest-paid public worker, took a 0.6 percent cut and now makes $220,500 per year.
Battle Ground Public Schools Superintendent Shonny Bria’s base pay fell 4 percent to $151,387, the same percentage cut as other Battle Ground school administrators. In La Center, Superintendent Mark Mansell got a 5 percent raise — but he’d already taken a voluntary 10 percent pay cut in 2009.
Vancouver Public Schools Superintendent Steven Webb called his $12,000 pay cut, the county’s biggest, “small relative to the $7 million dollar shortfall.” He said it was “my personal commitment” to the district’s “core mission” of teaching.
Webb now makes $192,000 annually.
Public vs. private
So, how do public workers’ raises compare to private ones? It depends what kind of government job you’re talking about.
In Clark County, average private-sector wages have risen 30 percent since 1990, adjusted for inflation, according to the state Employment Security Department.
Government workers’ pay in the county, meanwhile, has risen just 21 percent for the period. Most of that ground was lost during the late 1990s, when private workers’ pay soared.
Educators, though, have done better than average over the years. Even after inflation, state education workers’ pay is up 35 percent for the period.
As pay increases have stalled, many public agencies worry about staff retention and recruitment.
“The ones that we worry about the most are the professional-level people — the engineers, the accountants, the attorneys,” said Glenn Olson, Clark County’s deputy administrator and the county’s 41st best-paid local government employee, whose $140,000 salary has been frozen since 2008. “I’ve had two senior IT people leave since we just started not giving raises.”
Still, as long as the county’s labor market remains swamped by job-seekers, Olson’s computer professionals and others tempted to leave public service may find few good options outside government.
“I coaxed one of them back,” Olson added.
Same job, more pay
In large local governments, most lower-ranking employees — often including the professionals Olson mentioned, and hundreds of the workers who are in The Columbian’s salary database — are represented by public-sector unions like the Association of State, County and Municipal Employees, the Washington Education Association or the International Association of Fire Fighters.
To give employees incentives to rise into management, managers’ salaries and benefits often relate indirectly to union contracts.
But successful union negotiators aren’t the only thing that drive pay increases.
Take firefighters, for example. Under state law, fire departments with unionized workers are required to consider the pay and benefits in “fire departments of similar size” when setting wages, regardless of the local labor market and cost of living.
Managers at local fire departments complain that the law sends firefighters’ pay on an upward spiral.
“It just seesaws back and forth,” said Dennis Mason, chief of Clark County Fire and Rescue in Battle Ground and Ridgefield. “This one gets a raise, and that one gets a raise. … It just doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that’s the way the law is written.”
Mason’s department is a powerful example of the law. When it was formed in 2008 by merging Ridgefield’s and Battle Ground’s rural fire districts, leaders sold the merger as a money-saving measure that would allow more firefighters to be hired. When the issue went to ballot, 86 percent of voters endorsed it.
Firefighters’ unions didn’t object. It was an easy pill to swallow: when two small departments became one big department, every worker would suddenly be up for a big raise.
They got it. In 2009, the next contract for Battle Ground’s firefighters gave them a 9.5 percent raise over 2007 — for the most senior firefighters, annual pay went from $68,808 to $75,348 over two years. The figures don’t include overtime or hazard pay.
Abe Rommel, a captain at the combined department who represented IAFF Local 3674 in the negotiations, said the raise was designed to match adjoining Fire District 6, in Hazel Dell, which had been able to lure a few firefighters away from the smaller districts.
“We weren’t making a competitive wage for Clark County,” said Rommel, who now earns $80,736. “We lost several people from both sides to Vancouver and District 6.”
Since the 2009 raise, Rommel said, he doesn’t think a single firefighter has left for another district because of pay.
The better retention is helping give Battle Ground and Ridgefield citizens “a world-class department,” he said.
Still, Rommel thinks firefighters are motivated mostly by their love of the job.
“Pretty much everybody around here, at least that I know, they don’t do it for the money,” said Rommel, whose 2010 raise was 1 percent. “If I was going for just money, I would have got into a different line of work.”
Michael Andersen: 360-735-4508 or michael.andersen@columbian.com.
