Jacksonville Beach is restructuring its pay scale to help employees move through salary ranges faster and make it easier for the city to retain workers in hard-to-fill positions.
The City Council approved the changes Monday as part of an amendment to the Position Classification and Pay Plan for nonunion employees. The changes include a 2% increase for most positions effective Oct. 1, with larger targeted increases for positions where city officials say market pressures have made recruitment and retention more difficult.
Deputy City Manager Karen Nelson said 89% of the city’s 390 nonunion positions will benefit from the more competitive pay schedule, while the remaining 11% will receive targeted increases based on market conditions.
“Most of those positions lie within Beaches Energy Services. We found that they will need an additional increase just to remain competitive in the market,” Nelson said.
The changes also will reclassify eight positions to higher pay grades and revise eight position titles within the pay plan.
“Of those titles, there is only one that will represent a big addition to the total number of authorized positions, and that is the assistant director of Public Works,” Nelson said.
“For the other two operating departments, we are asking for an assistant director in Beaches Energy and Parks and Recreation, but those will be current titles that will be revised to those assistant director positions.”
Nelson, Human Resources Director Kimberly Bennett and Chief Financial Officer Ashlee Gossett consulted with surrounding government agencies to analyze market pay structures.
They found that many competing agencies had smaller pay grades, allowing employees to advance through the salary ranges more quickly.
City staff discussed the changes during a series of council briefings before Monday’s vote. The total cost of the amended pay scale was included in the financial impact section of the city’s final operating budget, which also was adopted Monday.
Councilor John Wagner said it is important to ensure the amended pay scale helps maintain the long-term viability of the Beaches Energy apprenticeship program. The city loses an estimated 10% to 15% of its municipal employees every year.
“This will serve to solve some of that problem for us and be able to move those positions up through the pay grade quicker,” Nelson said. “We appreciate the input.”
Beaches Energy Director Alan Putnam said entry-level lineworkers at JEA advance to the top of the pay grade as soon as they graduate from the apprenticeship program.
“It would take our employees nine years to catch up to the JEA employees. And that’s assuming that JEA got no further increases,” he said.
Putnam said some employees have quit in the middle of the city’s apprenticeship program to start over with JEA, knowing they stand to receive a larger increase at the end of the four-year program.
“I think this plan goes a long way to keep our employees here,” he said.
Nelson said the goal was to provide a larger pay increase to employees after they graduate from the apprenticeship program. The city also established an incentive program to encourage retention during the second year in entry-level journey lineworker and relay substation positions.
“For those technical positions in Beaches Energy, including the apprentices for lineworker and relay substation technicians, we have taken a good look at not only moving the pay grades by 5% for market alignment, but we also looked at that next step in ladder progression, which is the entry-level journey lineworker and the relay substation entry level,” she said.
“We are asking to move those pay grades up for a lineworker and substation tech by a larger percentage at minimum to provide an 18% increase for apprentices coming out of the program. Once they reach year two, they would be provided with a 5% increase in lieu of the merit pay and again at year five, another 5% increase, so that will serve to move them through the pay grade a lot sooner.”
Citing uncertainty surrounding Amendment 3, Councilor Dan Janson asked whether the city could support the increases if voters approve the measure in November.
Gossett said her team modeled the financial impact using the city’s five-year cash flow projections.
“I do not have a crystal ball, but obviously the further you get into the future, the less clear the environment is, but each of the funds that are impacted by these changes can support it in the five years,” she said.
“Should the amendment pass, I think the council will be faced with a pretty big decision on what to do. It will impact governmental operations, so choices will have to be made on service levels and alternate revenue streams.”
