A new non-bargaining employee pay plan was presented to the Cape Coral City Council Wednesday, which would bring its employees closer to the city goal of the 75th percentile for compensation.<\/p>\n
City Manager Michael Ilczyszyn said employees who are not included within union contracts are the last group for the city to implement their compensation study for, as they have dealt with police, fire and general union compensation through negotiations.<\/p>\n
Baker Tilly Compensation Manager Sarah Towne said the study went through a five-phase process that took 127 positions to benchmark for the survey. She said 123 were for non-bargaining and four were for police and fire command staff.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we go out to the market, we are not looking at title to title. We are looking at a position that is appropriate and effective that is doing similar work,\u201d she said. \u201cThe work is fundamentally the same, quality match of job duties and minimum qualifications.\u201d<\/p>\n
The study looked at 10 public peer organizations but they were only able to gather information from nine. Those included Fort Lauderdale, Lakeland, Miami, Orlando, Palm Bay, Port St. Lucie, St. Petersburg, Tallahassee and Tampa.<\/p>\n
The market assessment for fire included Fort Lauderdale, Miramar, St. Petersburg and Tampa, while police included Clearwater, Coral Springs, Port St. Lucie, St. Petersburg and Tampa.<\/p>\n
The study was based on the cost of labor \u2014 the supply and demand of labor \u2014 based on the Economic Research Institute. Towne said they were able to drill into a specific geographic area while looking at the cost of labor.<\/p>\n
Cape Coral is at 94.1 on a scale of 100, which is where the United States sits.<\/p>\n
From there the study was able to identify the average minimum, midpoint, and maximum results. Towne said they did not want to look just at starting salaries, as the city does not want to be the training ground before employees find somewhere else with a more competitive wage.<\/p>\n
For non-bargaining, she said the city is leading in compensation at 4.3% above the market at minimum, matching at midpoint with .7% below the market and lacking at the maximum at 5.5% below the market for the 75th percentile.<\/p>\n
For the fire and police positions, the city fell to 16.3% below market at the minimum for the 75th\u00a0percentile, 4.0% below at market for midpoint and 4.8% above market at the maximum.<\/p>\n
The current starting minimum wage for non-bargaining is $21.79 an hour with an annual salary of $45,323.20.<\/p>\n
Towne said they redesigned and built in a new pay plan, which is still an open plan from minimum to maximum. There are 25 grades providing much more opportunity to assign positions to each of the grades.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe midpoint is key, it\u2019s the anchor to the market \u2013 the desire to be at the 75th\u00a0percentile that is what we are anchoring,\u201d Towne said. \u201cThis pay structure is aligned to the 75th\u00a0percentile.\u201d<\/p>\n
She said they are narrower on the front end for the learning curve starting at 50% and gradually going up to 60%, which allows the minimum and maximum to remain competitive. Towne said it is tailored at a 6% jump between each grade, which provides a much smoother progression.<\/p>\n
The new starting minimum wage proposed is $22.69 an hour with an annual pay of $47,200.<\/p>\n
Towne said they also recommend a separate public safety command pay plan that is specific to the fire marshal, fire division chief and deputy fire chief, as well as the police captain, and deputy police of chief.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo keep at the current pay structure the pay range is too wide,\u201d she said. \u201cWe have tried to build them a pay structure that limits overlap and compression. We developed a new open plan from minimum to maximum.\u201d<\/p>\n
Again, the pay structure is aligned to be market competitive at the 75th\u00a0percentile at midpoint. The range spread is narrowed to 22% of the distance from the minimum to the maximum.<\/p>\n
The midpoint for a police captain is $172,782.19 and police sergeant is $111,342.40. For fire a battalion chief midpoint pay is $132,075.84 compared to a fire marshal at $163,997.97.<\/p>\n
A classification schedule will be voted on at the next City Council meeting, Nov. 5.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new non-bargaining employee pay plan was presented to the Cape Coral City Council Wednesday, which would bring…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28371,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[209,211,210],"class_list":["post-28370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral-headlines","tag-cape-coral-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28370\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}