This is how much Lexington could spend on salaries to attract, retain city employees

A compensation study analyzing 1,600 positions in the Lexington merged government recommended upping some starting pay and increasing current pay for some positions.

The Management Advisory Group study said making those salary adjustments for city employees not covered by collective bargaining agreements — police, fire and corrections — would cost the city roughly $2.7 million annually.

The total number of positions that would receive a pay bump is 841 positions; 143 of those are vacant. Those pay raises will depend on how much that person is currently underpaid based on the compensation study.

The Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council voted during a Tuesday work session to move the changes in salary to the council agenda for Thursday. A final vote is expected Oct. 27.

Chief Administrative Officer Sally Hamilton said the second part of the study will look at gender and race to determine if there are inequalities in the current system. That’s something elected city leaders have asked the administration to analyze for several years, Hamilton said.

“I think this is going help us lift us up employees,” said Councilwoman Susan Lamb. “We have more jobs available than I have ever seen.”

Lamb first started working for the city in the late 1980s.

The city had set aside $5 million in the current-year budget for salary adjustments dictated by the compensation study. The Management Advisory Group did a similar compensation study for the city in 2014.

“We are still in a labor market that is considered robust,” said Russell Campbell, of the Management Advisory Group. Unemployment is low and demand for job candidates is high, he said. Campbell said the salary adjustments recommended in the study will help the city fill positions.

“This study focused on the position not the person,” Campbell said. “We do not make any recommendations on reorganizing departments or identify if a department was under- or over-staffed.”

Campbell said even if they found someone who was making more than the analysis dictated, the study did not recommend decreasing that salary.

The city has struggled in recent years to attract and keep employees in certain departments. Streets and roads, for example, has a current vacancy rate of 20%. The lack of staffing in that department meant the city was forced to nix its vacuum leaf pick up program. Keeping and retaining engineers has also been a challenge in recent years.

The Management Advisory Group study looked at jobs and pay for other city governments including Louisville, Cincinnati and other cities of similar size such as Chattanooga and Knoxville, Tenn.

The study recommends pay bumps for roughly half of the city’s non-sworn employees, said Tammy Walters, director of Human Resources for the city. That’s more employees with potential pay increases than the 2014 study, which recommended pay increases for roughly one-third of the city’s employees, Walters said.

Lexington has increased salaries for its bargaining units — police, fire and detention center unions — over the past two years. Those pay bumps have been costly. Still, police have said the pay increases are not enough to stop retirements from the department. The city is currently negotiating with police and other bargaining units to increase pay again to help deal with widespread vacancies in public safety.

The pay increases for police alone will cost an additional $21.3 million over the four-year life of the contract, city officials have said. That contract expires in 2023.

Walters said the compensation study will be available for employees to review after Tuesday. If the council approves the new salaries on Oct. 27 as expected the pay increases will take effect in early November, Walters said.