Springdale Council Considers Salaries

— Aldermen threw out several ideas at the City Council budget hearing Thursday, from raising more salaries to cutting them.

The meeting of the entire council as the Finance Committee centered on pay for city employees. The aim of the officials, said Mayor Doug Sprouse, seemed to be to get to the same goal.

“We’d all like to be the best paying city in the area,” Sprouse said, “but we can’t do that. We have to do the best we can with the money we have.”

Springdale has lost employees to other cities that pay better, said Police Chief Kathy O’Kelley and Fire Chief Jim Irwin.

Alderman Brad Bruns questioned why some employees received smaller raises than others. Alderman Jim Reed suggested reducing the raises of department heads. He also suggested a maximum raise for those employees outside of the police and fire departments to 4 percent.

“I’m getting mixed signals here,” Sprouse said. “Some of you are asking to give bigger raises and some want to cut the raises.”

Sprouse said he used a study by the Johanson Group to come up with the recommendations on salaries that he made in the 2013 budget.

“I’m not just pulling figures from the air,” Sprouse said. “It’s not shooting in the dark.”

Blair Johanson, the president of the group, attended the meeting to explain how the study worked.

Springdale is about 9 percent behind other cities in the area in its pay scale, Johanson said. His recommendation was to give uniformed police officers and firefighters, which are civil service employees, the equivalent of a 6 percent raise. Those not in civil service would receive raises ranging from 2 to 8 percent.

“You can’t catch up in one year,” Johanson said. “It might take three years. Other cities are giving raises each year, also.”

Supervisors, such as department heads, were falling even further behind in pay compared to other cities, Johanson said. He recommended bigger raises for the upper end of the pay scale.

“It’s hard to see the justification for a bigger raise for department heads when they are already making a lot more money than the other employees,” Bruns said.

Bruns also brought up the pay of the city attorney, which he said was too low. The city attorney is an elected official and wasn’t part of the pay study, Johanson said.

Loyd Price, Human Resources director, said he would research what other cities paid officials. That research would fit in with the Johanson study, O’Kelley said.

“From the mayor to the lowest employee, Springdale is the lowest paying city,” O’Kelley said.

That needs to change, Sprouse said.

“We’ve got to take care of our folks to compete,” Sprouse said.

The committee will meeting again to look at the budget at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday.

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