FAIRMONT– The Fairmont City Council heard a presentation on the city’s compensation and classification study during Monday evening’s council meeting.

The presentation was given by Leah Davis with Abdo, who has been leading the comp and class study that the city has been working on for nearly a year.

City Administrator Cathy Reynolds said that typically cities and governmental organizations will do comp and class studies every five to seven years to make sure the compensation scales are in line with comparable communities and to stay in line with pay equity laws. However she said the last time a study was done in Fairmont was in the 1990s

“We are well overdue for doing this. It’s been a great project to really look at the organization and evaluate our organizational structure, all of our job descriptions, where we’re at today, where we’re looking to go and finally looking at the compensation side,” Reynolds said.

Davis said it’s been a collaborative project and that city staff has been helpful in the process. She said the first big undertaking in the project was a full update of all of the job descriptions.

“That was a long process working through all of the existing positions. We also drafted proposed position descriptions for positions that it looked like could potentially be options down the road so they could be included in the study,” Davis said.

Once that was done, she said they did position scoring using the Hay Methodology, which is used by the state. She said it applies a point value to each position based on the overall impact and influence. They also take into consideration any risks associated with the jobs and physical conditions that need to be met.

“There are a lot of different ways to do the math when we do position scoring… when we get to the scores that we assign to each position, just know that you’d never compare yourself to say, Blue Earth, to a certain position. They may use different math for their scoring,” Davis explained.

As for comparables, she said they look at population, geography and similar distances from the metro area and organizations that have similar departments.

Davis said that a large motivator for the study was pay equity compliance, which is a tri-annual reporting that every public jurisdiction is required to report that measures female classes of employees and whether they’re being payed equitably to more male dominated positions if the scoring is similar.

“Having a structured stepping grade program is a very reliable way to keep yourself in compliance as you move forward,” Davis said.

She said that Abdo is also providing implementation tools and support for staff so that if and what they adopt can be managed into the future.

Davis said one of the goals of the study is to attract and retain employees and she pointed out that’s it’s a difficult market right now so they need good and relevant data.

“We based a lot of our recommendations on the assumption that you would like to be slightly above average in terms of compensation so that you’re able to attract and retain. Geographically you’re in a bit of a unique situation where you need large city employees but you’re pulling from a primary rural market,” Davis said.

She then went over a slide of the scoring for different positions in the city and shared key findings and considerations.

“Overall, minimum pay was just under .5 percent below market, on average,” Davis said.

She shared the three phases of the proposed implementation plan. She said no one would take a pay cut to implement it. Employees would be assigned to the closest rate of pay without going backwards. If approved, the city could adopt the plan for the 2023 year. Costs were also shared if the plan were to be implemented.

Council Member Bruce Peters made a motion to accept the report, but said he’d like to look at it more before adopting it. The motion passed. The item will be placed on the agenda for adoption at the next council meeting.