LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday began the process of approving more than $5 million in raises for county staff in a process that has been mostly conducted in closed-door negotiations, with little public dissemination.
During a sometimes confusing three-hour discussion, the majority of the board approved raises for management, confidential and District Attorney’s Office employee units but held off until next week, at the earliest, on agreements with numerous employee groups representing the rank and file, as those agreements were determined to not be ready.
The raises approved on Tuesday are set to go into effect immediately. If the other agreements aren’t approved on Tuesday or shortly thereafter, county officials indicated those employee groups may not see raises until March.
In a prepared video played during the meeting, Board Chair Moke Simon, Supervisor Bruno Sabatier and County Administrative Officer Carol Huchingson spoke about the proposed raises.
Huchingson said an early 2018 county staff survey found that 34 percent had applied for a job outside of the county in the prior 12 months, 87 percent were seeking more money, 75 percent of employees believed they were underpaid and fewer than 50 percent reported they could afford to go to the doctor when they needed to.
At that time, staff vacancy rates were about 25 percent, Huchingson said. This week, her office told Lake County News that the vacancy rate is 20 percent.
While COVID-19 has hit many communities hard in the short term, “We now believe we are entering a period of uncommon opportunity in Lake County,” Sabatier said, citing a strong housing market, sales tax revenue and a thriving cannabis industry.
Despite the tone set in the video, later in the morning, Sabatier came out against going further on some of the employee agreements, which were not in the final form staff had indicated they were, raising his concerns that negotiations had now moved into the public domain.
Supervisor Rob Brown, who was clear in his support of giving employees raises, also raised concerns about moving forward on some of the agreements.
He also was concerned about discussing some of the matters with the employee groups in open session and had asked to move into closed session.
“We’re not ready. We’re not ready to act on a lot of these,” Brown said.
Sabatier, Brown and Supervisor Tina Scott said they were under the impression that all of the agreements had been ready to go when the developments at the meeting revealed they clearly weren’t.
Sabatier asked the board to wait until all of the agreements were signed and finalized.
Despite those concerns, Simon urged the board to move forward with approving the agreements, even in tentative form, saying it had been done in the past.
The meeting would only become more confusing as the board switched back and forth among the agreements, finally approving some and not others.
The study behind the raises
The raises are the result of a $100,000 classification and compensation study that the county hired CPS HR, a Joint Powers Agency based in Sacramento, in November 2018 to complete.
The study, the first of its kind since 2003, compared the county of Lake’s salaries and classifications to 12 other counties: Calaveras, Colusa, Glenn, Humboldt, Mendocino, Napa, Nevada, Sonoma, Sutter, Tehama, Yolo and Yuba.
The study proposed reducing the county’s 12-step pay range to a five-step range, which is the framework the proposed agreements adopted.
CPS HR was set to present its study to the board at its March 17 meeting. However, that presentation was canceled, and the board instead focused on COVID-19 related issues, including approving Sheriff Brian Martin’s emergency declaration due to the pandemic. Two days later, the county went under a shelter in place order.
In response to questions posed to the board and county administrative staff by Lake County News in an email sent the night before the meeting, Huchingson referred to the fact that the study originally had been scheduled to go to the board in March, but that it was canceled. She did not explain why the contractor was not asked to give the presentation at another time.
Huchingson has been a key proponent of getting the study completed. Based on the numbers provided to Lake County by her own office, she is set to get a nearly 30-percent raise thanks to the action the board took.
But that’s not the highest percent increase: That honor goes to the Public Works director position, now held by Scott De Leon, which is in line for a 42.63-percent increase.
Responding to questions from Lake County News, Deputy County Administrative Officer Matthew Rothstein said the most recent raises given to county employers were a 3-percent negotiated increase for the Lake County Safety Employees Association in January 2017 and 2 percent bargained by Lake County Correctional Officers’ Association in December 2017.
In the 2015-16 fiscal year, Rothstein said “essentially all” county employees received a 3-percent cost of living adjustment and a 7-percent salary adjustment. At the same time, due to pension reform, Rothstein said public employers were required to cease paying the employee’s share of retirement costs, equivalent to 7 percent, which meant most employees netted an increase of less than 3 percent.
Rothstein said that this past December, a one-time stipend of $1,500 was provided to all full-time permanent employees, as a gesture of good faith, while bargaining units awaited implementation of our classification and total compensation study.
Salary changes proposed in several actions
In a cluster of nine untimed items, the board on Tuesday was to consider approving raises for the Lake County Deputy Sheriff’s Association; Lake County Employees Association Units No. 3, No. 4 and No. 5; Lake County Safety Employees Association; Lake County Correctional Officers Association; Lake County Deputy District Attorney’s Association; Lake County Sheriff’s Management Association; employees assigned to Confidential Units, Section A and B; and management employees.
The agreements’ language states that they will be in effect from Oct. 21, 2020, to Oct. 20, 2021, and will raise salaries to 85 percent of the market median, or the midpoint of the 12 counties included in the study.
The exceptions are the Lake County Sheriff’s Management Association and all other management employees, which will receive raises at 80 percent of the market median and for whom the agreements date from Nov. 1, 2020, to Oct. 31, 2021.
Huchingson said they’re doing a one-year agreement rather than a longer agreement in order to continue to assess the impacts of the pandemic.
Buried in the bottom of the MOU reports, in small print, was the total amounts to implement the raises: approximately $5,225,124 million, of which $1,919,285 comes from discretionary revenue in the general fund and $3,305,839 in state and federal funding sources that Huchingson’s office said is “readily available but historically underutilized.”
Only the agreement for the Lake County Deputy District Attorney’s Association had been signed. That morning, the Lake County Correctional Officers Association rejected the MOU offered to it, as did the Lake County Deputy Sheriff’s Association.
Lake County Deputy Sheriff’s Association President Gary Frace, who joined the meeting virtually, said the association had no idea that the item was to be on the agenda until seeing it in a Lake County News story on Monday.
Frace said they had never had a tentative agreement with the county, not even up until that morning. Frace recently took over as president and county staff said they had been in negotiations with another individual.
Overall, the staff reports left out information that specifically explained how those figures were arrived at, overall impacts on county funds, how many employees were at what steps, an analysis of ongoing impacts and how the proposals fit with the county’s Fiscal Crisis Management Plan.
In response to the questions submitted by Lake County News to the board and the County Administrative Office on Monday night, Deputy County Administrative Officer Stephen Carter said they are using extra revenue in the general fund, which has totaled $2 million annually over the past five years, to help pay for the raises, along with the state and federal funding sources.
Carter said the raises, if all of them are approved, would constitute a 9-percent increase to the county’s payroll costs and a 9-percent increase to the general fund.
“It’s a significant increase overall but there is room within our current ongoing revenues to support it,” he said.
Among the questions Lake County News asked was one about how the county was able to give the raises without the sales tax it had pitched to voters two years ago, which it said was necessary to increase salaries.
In response to that question, Scott said that had they gotten the sales tax, they would have raised salaries more, possibly to 100-percent of market median, not just 85 percent.
In voting for the memorandum of understanding with the Lake County Sheriff's Management Association, Sabatier abstained due to the timing. “I’m uncomfortable with management moving forward and employees being left behind.”
The only specific action the supervisors took to not increase salaries was to approve the first reading of an ordinance that will keep their current pay rates unchanged, an action necessary because, otherwise, the increases in staff pay would have increased theirs as well. By ordinance, they receive 60 percent of the average annual salaries of the district attorney, sheriff, assessor, auditor/controller and treasurer/tax collector.
Supervisors will continue to make $63,714 annually, with the board chair receiving additional compensation of $2,400.
The board also voted to change the titles of 52 positions and to abolish 30 others in order to meet the salary scale.
Lake County News has submitted several followup questions with the County Administrative Office regarding the impacts of the raises and will report that information in upcoming articles.
Summary of the board’s actions
The board’s Tuesday actions are as follows.
7.3: Consideration of an ordinance amending Section 2-3A.1 of Article I, Chapter 2 of the Lake County Code, Compensation of the Board of Supervisors. The board chose to defer enforcing its ordinance so that its members don’t receive salary increases as a consequence of the actions taken to implement the classification and total compensation study. Action: Approved 5-0 on the first reading, with a second reading set for Oct. 27.
7.4: Consideration of job classification changes based on the October 2019 CPS-HR Classification and Compensation Study. Action: Approved 5-0.
7.5: Consideration of memorandum of understanding by and between the Lake County Deputy Sheriff’s Association Units and the county of Lake for Oct. 21, 2020, to Oct. 20, 2021. Action: Voted 5-0 to continue to the Oct. 27 meeting.
7.6: Consideration of memorandum of understanding by and between the Lake County Employees Association Units No. 3, No. 4 and No. 5 and the county of Lake for Oct. 21, 2020, to Oct. 20, 2021. Action: Voted 4-1 to continue to Oct. 27 meeting; Chair Moke Simon voted no because he wanted to act at the Oct. 20 meeting.
7.7: Consideration of memorandum of understanding by and between the Lake County Safety Employees Association and the county of Lake for Oct. 21, 2020, to Oct. 20, 2021. Action: Approved 3-0; Supervisor Bruno Sabatier and Supervisor Tina Scott abstained.
7.8: Consideration of memorandum of understanding by and between the Lake County Correctional Officers Association Units and the county of Lake for Oct. 21, 2020, to Oct. 20, 2021. Action: Voted 5-0 to continue to the Oct. 27 meeting.
7.9: Consideration of memorandum of understanding by and between the Lake County Deputy District Attorney’s Association and the county of Lake for Oct. 21, 2020, to Oct. 20, 2021. Action: Approved in a 5-0 vote.
7.10: Consideration of memorandum of understanding by and between the Lake County Sheriff’s Management Association Units and the county of Lake for Nov. 1, 2020, to Oct. 31, 2021. Action: Approved in a 4-0 vote; Sabatier abstained, citing timing.
7.11: Consideration of resolution establishing salaries and benefits for employees assigned to the Confidential Unit, Section A, for Oct. 21, 2020, to Oct. 20, 2021. Action: Approved in a 5-0 vote.
7.12: Consideration of resolution establishing salaries and benefits for employees assigned to the Confidential Unit, Section B, for Oct. 21, 2020, to Oct. 20, 2021. Action: Approved in a 5-0 vote.
7.13: Consideration of resolution establishing salaries and benefits for management employees for the period of Nov. 1, 2020, to Oct. 31, 2021. Action: Approved in a 4-0 vote; Sabatier abstained.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
Board of Supervisors begins process of approving millions of dollars in pay raises for staff
- Elizabeth Larson
- Posted On