Roanoke Rapids City Council Tuesday was presented with three options regarding a pay and classification study which was unveiled during its meeting.

The council did not dive into specifics of the plan which was conducted by the MAPS Group over the course of several months and Erika Phillps of the company said there is still work to do, including writing class specifications for all city positions and presenting a final report that documents the methodology used to conduct the study, its findings, and management recommendations.

The options that the study gives for implementation are as follows

Option 1

Employees are moved into the range above the minimum rate based on 1 percent per year of service with the city. 

The annual cost to implement Option I is 1 percent per year of service equals 6 percent  payroll 

Option 2

Employees are moved into the range above the minimum rate based on 1 percent per year of service in their current position. 

The annual cost to implement Option 2 is 1 percent per year of service equals 2.8 percent payroll 

Option 3

Employees are moved into the range above the minimum rate based on 1 percent per blended years of service with the city and years in current position. 

The annual cost to implement Option 3 is 1 percent per blended years of service equals 4.1 percent payroll

“We look at the positions internally and compare them to each other and then we look at the positions and compare them to the market,” Phillips said. “We want to see where Roanoke Rapids is now and where the market is. Are you in line with the market, are you above, are you below? Where do you want to be and where can you afford positions to be?”

She said, “The primary goal of the study is to make sure that the city’s pay plan is competitive in the market so you’re competitive with your peer organizations because you want to be able to recruit applicants when you have vacancies, you want to retain the employees that you have.”

While not getting into specifics of the current pay structure within the city, Phillips said any kind of pay decrease is never recommended. “We are not looking at individual employee job performance. We don’t know when we come in to meet the employees if they’re an excellent employee or maybe they are poor-performing employees. We don’t know those things. We don’t ask those kinds of questions of the employees or the supervisors.”

The pay and classification study was the result of city council requests over the past several budget cycles, Human Resources Director Christina Caudle said, in an effort “to make informed decisions on things like employee pay. When the city joined the North Carolina League of Municipalities property liability and worker’s comp insurance pool back in fiscal year 23-24 we were able to obtain more of a financially-appealing price on both a personnel policy review and rewrite and a pay and class study with the preferred partner — the MAPS Group.”

Funding for the projects was approved for the 24-25 fiscal year “and we began working directly with MAPS Group on these valuable projects right away,” Caudle said.

City Manager Kelly Traynham said following the meeting that over several years the city has looked at different positions such as in the police department. “We haven’t looked across the board and the council has brought that up at times.”

A couple of years ago human resources did an inhouse pay study. “So this information that we’ve received is not surprising.”

Traynham said, “This is about the position and not the person.”

She said the city has been good about adjusting starting pay “but we have not been good about adjusting for compression. I don’t want to make this about people who are higher paid or not. It’s just more or less making those adjustments responsibly so that we don’t get so far behind.”

The city manager said the information will be used as the city creates its budget for the upcoming fiscal year and to look “at what it would take to get us into a more competitive job market and that’s the point.”