A bill for an ordinance amending the classification and pay plan for employees in the Career Service and for certain employees not in the Career Service. Amends the Classification and Pay Plan by abolishing the City’s twenty current pay tables, replacing the City’s current pay tables with three proposed pay tables, and reassigning the city’s current classifications to the proposed pay grades table and amends Sections 18 and 14 of the Denver Revised Municipal Code to reflect the streamlining and modernization of the pay tables and pay ranges, maintenance of the pay tables and market adjustment allocations, and certain associated terminology. The Committee approved filing this item at its meeting on 3-9-21.
Yes I move that council bills 20 1-0233 and 20 10234 be ordered published in a black bag. Thank you. It has been moved and seconded the combined 30 minute courtesy public hearing for Council Bill 233 and Council Bill 234 is open. Speakers may offer comments on either or both items. The Office of Human Resources has previously presented these items at our Finance and Governance Committee, and they are available to answer questions after the hearing . And it looks like we have. Three folks. Signed up to speak this evening. And our first speaker is Mike McKee. Good evening, council members, and thank you for taking my comments. I while I had to make a choice, when I signed up to speak as to whether I was speaking for or against the bill I chose against, although I am not generally opposed overall to the proposed changes to the pay and classification plan. However, I do have one area of particular concern which has to do with the proposed method for handling positions that fall more than 10 to 20% behind the market, behind market pay. It has those two different thresholds depending on the length of time that they were behind market. And unless I'm missing something, it appears to me that and I'd like to say, first of all, I guess I to step back that with my group at the airport did and I'm sorry, I didn't fully introduce myself. My city of residence is Aurora, but I'm a city employee and I work at the airport. So but I do have to first thank the group of employees that are who met with us two different times to help answer our questions and help us to understand the proposal. They were very helpful and really kind in spending significant time with us to try to understand. But I still have that one aspect, as I said, that I'm not clear on and I'm concerned about because it appears that from the plan, unless something has changed in the interim, that there isn't a methodology that I see for bringing a position that falls more than 10% below market. Back up to market or closer than 10% below. It looks like the plan is designed to only bring those positions back to 10% below. And I know there are some complicating factors. There's lag in a survey data, and sometimes you can overshoot and end up actually on the other side of the equation where it can be higher than market. So I know there some buffer that they're trying to build in there. And they they indicated when we discussed that that there may be other mechanisms that can be used to bridge that gap. But I'm not clear on what those are and haven't heard a concise explanation of what an alternate method might be for for addressing that. So I'm concerned that that the plan might leave a number of positions over time, at least 10% behind market for a length of time. Thank you. That's all I had. All right. Thank you very much, Mike. And next up, we have Annie Christianson. Hi, counsel. How are you today? Thanks for letting us speak on this. Um, you know, to reiterate what Mike McKee was saying, you know, we're kind of worried about, you know, how what mechanism that they're going to be using to, you know, get people up to their market rates. It's not clear in the Gallagher consultation package. And, you know, without and also without a pay survey, you know, the 2020 pay survey did not get approved as well as, you know, the other the pace or even for 2021 potentially not being approved as well. You know, while leaving people 10%, you know, behind the market all the time, there might be quite, quite a financial burden once the pay surveys start up again and, you know, leaving employees behind. By so far, it'll be two years, three years before employees are caught back up to market pay. So I think, like Mike McKee was saying, you know, there's really nothing in this presentation that really explains how what mechanism they're going to be using to, you know, get people up to market pay. And yeah, that's a bit worrisome and. While I think it's a good idea to make the processes more efficient and easier to do the survey to help classification and compensation to, you know, make sure that employees are being paid what they're supposed to be being paid. Yeah, I just worry that there's not a good enough explanation on how that will come about. So thank you so much for your time. All right. Thank you, Annie. And our last speaker is Jesse Paris. Yes. Good evening. Members of council, those watching at home. My name is Justin Muschamp Pierce and I'm representing for Black Sox and War for Self-defense Front line, Black Nose Unity Party of Colorado. And I will be the next mayor of Denver in 2023. My question. In regards to this bill oh and I reside in District eight and Councilman Emergence District in regards to this bill tonight I had a few questions. I wanted to know if this pertains to all city employees or if it just applies to so-called service providers, front line responders. Exactly what categories of employees does this apply to all city employees or just a certain segment of city employees? So somebody could please answer that question. I would greatly appreciate it. All right. Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak tonight. All right. Thank you, Jesse. And that concludes our speakers this evening. Questions from members of Council on Council Bill two, three, three and or council Bill two, three, four. Councilmember Hines. Thank you, Madam President. Just is it true that that many cities are opting out of pay surveys for South excuse me, salary surveys in 2021? I think that's all right. Thank you for the question. We've got Karen Parco on the line and Nicole as well. And so we'll go ahead and ask Karen. You can go ahead and unmute and answer Councilman Haynes question or Nicole, whichever. Hi. This is Karen Parco, Office of Human Resources. Yes. First of all, thank you very much, Counsel, for your consideration of this bill. And thank you so much to Mr. McKeon, Mr. Paris and Ms.. Christiansen for their questions. Nicole is on the line here, and her her team is the one that has put considerable amount of work into these proposals and has met with several of the agencies answering employee questions. So I'm going to ask Nicole if she would mind addressing each one of these questions directly. Hi. Good evening. Go ahead and call. Good evening, council members. I hope you can hear me okay. I can answer these questions for you for sure. To address Mr. Parrish this question. The consolidated pay tables and the new streamlined processes to address position audits and of cycle pay adjustments and market adjustments. And the many sundry components of these proposals will apply to all city employees, with a few exceptions. So they will not apply to elected officials, to appointed charter officers, to the uniform, collectively bargained employees. So it's not applying to every single cohort of employees. So but but most it will apply to most. So that is the answer to that question. And I think Councilman Hines was asking if other cities were not doing pay survey types of of adjustments and processes. And from what we are seeing in the literature, that is absolutely true. We saw a very recent compelling survey from World of Work that showed that market adjustments were down significantly. Organizations are just not in financial straits to provide those or lack the data to support such adjustments. And then the other questions that Mike and Annie were were addressing, and I did meet with Mike and Annie, and so thank you guys for acknowledging that we did meet with you and spend time with you. So their question was around the market adjustment methodology and getting employees to within 10% of market. And the reason for the 10% plus or -10% of market median pay is considered market. That's a leading practice. You'll find that in almost every organization. And so when we're trying to close the gap to get within ten plus or -10% with that 10% number, I mean, that's kind of a it's it's a bit ephemeral, right? Market data is it's just market data. It's one one it's one piece of data. And, you know, we don't want to as I think Mike McKee, Mr. McKee mentioned, we don't we don't want to, you know, overshoot the mark. We don't want to undershoot the market. We're trying to find the sweet spot to move employees to the central tendency of market median pay. And that is what these recommendations are indeed designed to do. And the new proposals will create the market adjustment based on the classifications degree of led to the market. So not all classifications lag the market by the same amount. So this process is much more nuanced than what we've done in the past, which was very broad and may have over or underpaid, whereas this this approach is much more sophisticated and will be more precise moving forward. So I hope that helps a little bit. And the other final thing I'll just say is that the market adjustments do typically apply to a small select number of employees. And I think people have this misconception that it can apply to many. And what applies to many is the annual merit increase program, which of course we didn't have in 2021, and many organizations didn't have those because of the pandemic. And, you know, like I said before, many organizations are not doing market adjustments again because of the pandemic. You know, our economy was was very different before COVID 19 came into our lives. So we're. Hoping that we. Are able to unwind and recover from this pandemic and able to have a merit increase program in 2022, which would impact on all of our employees. But for example, the 2020 pay survey that did not get approved last year would only have affected 130 employees, and the city has about 10,000 employees. So just to give a little context there, so I hope that that helps a little bit. And thank you. Thank you for the questions. Oh, definitely. Well, thank you, Nicole and Karen and Councilman Hines, I was going to come back to you to see if you had additional questions. Thank you, Madam President. So the first question that I asked was, is it true that many cities are emptying out of the city pay survey in 2021? It sounds like they are. The follow up question is, does that mean that it would make it difficult to compare data in 2021, even if we were to like one of the one of the concerns is that we're opting out of a theoretically assuming we were to vote on this, opting out of a salary survey in 2021. I guess the nature of the question that I'm trying to get at or the answer the information I'm trying to get at is even if we wanted to find the survey , would we even have relevant data? That's I mean, I would hate to. And that's that's that's the question. That's that's a great question, Councilman Hines. And the answer is there's no, we don't have the data. That is a big reason why we are proposing to not run the 2021 market survey. Most of our data is pre-COVID. We are in the process of participating in salary surveys now for 2021. We'll get that market data over the summer. We plan to run the next survey in Q4 of 2021. We'll bring it forward for socialization in Q1 of 2022 and bring it to council for approval into the Career Service Board in Q2 of 2022. That is our game plan because we need to have market data that is true up to 2021. So right now what we're dealing with is a real mixed bag. I've got a lot of data that's pre-COVID, which, you know, is not reliable. And then I've got a couple of vendors which ran refreshes to their survey in the fall, and we tried to run a pay survey for market adjustments just on two surveys. We would miss hundreds and hundreds of benchmarks. So we would the analysis really couldn't be done. So that is a big piece of it is because of the market, the lack of reliable market data. So you raise a very, very good point. But the data is coming and we really are anticipating getting enough data over the summer to propose moving the tables on January 1st , 2022. And we are also intending to run a PACE survey in Q4 of 2021, like I said, for socialization and approval in early 2022. So I hope that helps. All right. Well, thank you, Nicole and Councilman Haynes. Looks like you're all good. All right, wonderful. Well, seeing no other hands raised, the public hearing is closed. Comments by members of Council on Council Bill 233 or 234. Right. Seen no comments. Madam Secretary, roll call on council bills. 233 and 234, please. Wow. I. CdeBaca. I. Clark. Right. Flynn. I. Herndon. I. I. Cashman. I. Can I? Sandoval. I. Sawyer. I. Torres. I. Madam President. I. Madam Secretary, close the voting and announce results. 12 Eyes. 12 Eyes Council bills, 233 and 234 have been ordered published. And thank you to Karen and Nicole for joining us this evening. And the questions by the public are pre adjournment announcement on Monday, April 19. The Council will hold a required public hearing on Council Bill 211, changing the zoning classification for 2017 North Colorado Boulevard in South Park Hill. Any protests against Council Bill 211 must be filed with council offices no later than noon on Monday, April 12. There being no further business before this body, this meeting is adjourned.