Annually a review of the City's Classification and Pay Plan is conducted to ensure that it remains competitive, allowing the City to achieve its stated budget goal of being able to "attract and retain the best employees available through maintaining competitive pay and fringe benefit programs." Part of the annual review includes salary comparisons between selected Brentwood positions and those of several other relevant Tennessee governments.
BACKGROUND
In 2017, Burris, Thompson & Associates, a leading Tennessee-based compensation consulting firm with extensive experience with governmental entities was engaged by the City to conduct a comprehensive compensation and salary study. This project included comparing all positions in the City's pay plan with similar positions in 14 benchmark public sector employers that are representative of the competitive labor market for the City of Brentwood. Because the City also competes with general business and industry for employees for many City jobs, market data from general business and industry for jobs similar to those at the City of Brentwood were compiled from the latest Economic Research Institute (ERI) Salary Assessor database using data for the Nashville area.
Recommendations from this project were approved in the 2018 Fiscal Year Operating Budget and included increasing all pay ranges and positions within the City's Classification and Pay Plan by 8.7% to position City jobs at the 75th percentile of the relevant labor market.
To ensure the City continues to maintain a competitive position in the difficult middle Tennessee labor market, regular adjustments to the Classification and Pay Plan are necessary. This practice ensures that the City can continue to recruit and retain qualified employees to meet our service requirements and avoid more costly, one-time adjustments to regain a competitive position if it is ever lost. For this reason, the City has a long practice to making reasonable adjustments to pay scales on a regular basis.
For the same reason, the overall Classification and Pay Plan was increased by an additional 4% at the beginning of Fiscal Year 2019. It was again increased by 1.5% at the beginning of Fiscal Year 2020. No employee pay adjustments were authorized at the beginning of Fiscal Year 2021 due to the uncertainty of revenue projections related to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, effective January 4, 2021, the Board of Commissioners approved another 4% market adjustment.
In March of this year, the City's compensation consultants, Burris, Thompson & Associates compared benchmark positions in the City's pay plan to similar jobs from employers in the relevant job market, using current salary data. Overall, the results of this review showed that Brentwood's salary structure is now approximately 99% of the target point of the 75th percentile of the relevant labor market.
The Classification and Pay Plan consists of 16 basic pay groups with sub-groups for the various public safety positions. Each pay group has a corresponding pay range and an approximate 50% spread from the minimum amount to the maximum amount. This allows for increased earning potential for most career employees. Also, several Brentwood job classifications have multiple levels that cover more than one pay range (i.e. Accounting Clerk I and II, Maintenance Worker and Senior Maintenance Worker, Equipment Operator I, II and III, Police Officer I and II, Librarian I and II.) This provides a meaningful career path in many functional areas within the organization.
|