City Council - Regular Meeting

We're live. Good evening everyone. And I'd like to call the study session of the university city council to order on April 13th, 2026 at 5:30 p.m. Uh, first before I turn it over to acting city manager Brook Sharp, are there any changes to the regular agenda this evening? Council member Smson. Uh, thank you, Mayor Crow. Um, I wanted to ask to have um item excuse me K7 move to the city manager report.

Okay. I understand that uh council member SM would like at the time of the city council meeting uh if you and one of your colleagues will do the second then we can make the change to the agenda. Miss Sharp.

All right. Honorable Mayor Crow, members of the city council, tonight we have Joe Rice with CBiz here to present the results of the compensation study. Uh, as you all know, we engaged CBiz in 2025 to uh do an update for us. I think the last one was done five years prior in 2020. So, um, we committed to doing these I think every five years or so. And so I'll turn it over to Joe to present the results and then once he's done um we can discuss the um recommended plans and move forward. Oh, you need to hit the button at the button.

There we go. I was I was only told three times how to do that.

Well, good good evening. Good to be with you today. So, uh Joe Rice, I'm with CBIS compensation consulting. Um I did have the pleasure of working on the last compensation study as well. was actually I think 2018 when we delivered those results. So it has been uh a few years. If you're not familiar with CBIZ we are um we're we're a national firm. We have offices across the country where we provide a lot of different services. Our comp team is fairly small but we happen to be based out of St. Louis. We do a lot of work within the public sector. So it's always good to work close to home and not have to hop on a plane for these these type of meetings. See, so really what we've outlined here um is to give an overview of the different project steps and as we go through that highlight um some initial findings and then certainly close make sure we cover recap the the different recommendations and then certainly answer any questions uh that you have about the process or the the recommendations. So moving on to the project overview. This first slide just sets up some of the um compensation philosophy related elements and how we approach the work. So as we look at this, we want to first identify what is the relevant peer data, salary survey data to bring forward to make sure we're benchmarking um appropriately. Salary surveys or peer data is often broken out in terms of industry, geography, or size. So we evaluate those different factors. From a size standpoint, most organizations want to compare to um peers that have similar financial resources to what they have. So, we might look at things like operating budget. Um sometimes we might look at things like headcount, uh aspects like that, not to identify exact matches, but just make sure we're in the right ballpark range. We also want to focus on geography and that's fairly straightforward here. We're going to focus on um you know certainly peers that are within the immediate region as a part of the study and then from a industry it's exclusively focused on uh

either you know public sector municipal government part of that is going to be a peer group which I'll discuss in a few slides and then the second part of this uh that last column talks about market placement so as we evaluate salary survey benchmarking results we need to figure out where within that market range the city wants to position ition their pay plan. The most common approach would be to match the market. That is to build your pay plan around the market 50th percentile. That's where half pay more half pay less. And so it was established or formalized in the last study to target a market 75th percentile. So that is a market lead position where the pay plan is going to be skewed higher in that range relative to the peers. One of our first steps as we get started is we want to make sure that this benchmarking process accurately reflects the duties, responsibilities, qualifications. So we started with uh some job content where we launched a job analysis questionnaire. So it started by hearing from employees. They completed a questionnaire to describe their duties, responsibilities, qualifications. It was that content that we used for benchmarking. And then we also updated job descriptions based on that content. Uh as well as we move to the market analysis process. Again that starts with evaluating job documentation. As we look through um our salary survey library we want to bring out some sources to round out the peer group. So we're identifying um you know what matches those different characteristics that we talked about from the labor market. We also looked at a custom survey. Again we'll share those peers. I think on the next slide we go through the job matching based on not titles but again duties responsibilities from a technical standpoint we do age the salary survey data so we know that when we collect information it is collected at a point in time and we need to account for some movement that wages

uh will continue to adjust and so as we plan forward we're using a 2.6% aging factor on that data and then we document different market percentiles of pay. So we're looking to just before we get to structures and implementation just what did we find within that distribution of pay and that's one of our first deliverables is just you know what did we document for base salary and total cash compensation. We have a visual of that on the right where we plot a normal distribution. Pay is usually not distributed that cleanly. Uh but as you we focus on that just want to highlight again that you know we're looking at that market 75th percentile to build the pay plan. That's the point where 25% of the peers are going to pay above that value, 75% pay below, and then we put a range around that to give uh some flexibility. All right. So on this slide, we we highlight the custom survey participants. And so as we go through this process, we want to identify peer cities that have they're either you know, geographically your neighbors, they're going to have a similar uh population, employee headcount, budget, those different factors. We have those documented here. And as we go through that, we document, we have a data collection file and we ask uh contacts within each of these cities to fill that out, list their employee pay, and then match it to one of the jobs that we have in our our survey. So, we have that active matching process. And uh we don't always get 100% participation. That's pretty rare. So, it's the ones with the asterisk either declined or just did not participate and provide their data. So it's made up of of those remaining peers. This slide shows the initial pay comparison uh at a high level. So when we go through that first step of just documenting market competitive pay on the horizontal axis here we have the

market data uh at the market 50th percentile. Um I think actually it's the market 75th percentile. Sorry. And then on the vertical we have pay within the city. So if you pick any of those green dots and you draw a line down, that's what we show as the market 75th percentile. Draw a line to the left. That's what we show as average internal pay. And then we add that dotted green trend line to just show how well changes in the market translate to changes in pay internally. The blue dots in the trend line is the market data plotted against itself. So it establishes a nice market line for comparison. So ideally what you want to see is some dots above that line, some dots below that line. It's going to be a matter of scale on whether or not we see that as being an issue. So what we see here is that pay starts off competitive at the low end. It's a little bit above that market trend line, but as we see market compensation increase, internal pay kind of flattens out and we start to lag uh as we move up. After we've assessed the the market data, we then look at the salary structure to identify is it still serving its purpose? Are there any changes that we need to make? So, as we do that, we're looking at how well does the minimum pay reflect uh you know the market, how well does the maximum pay kind of push that upper end and as well as how many steps it takes to move through that uh that pay structure. So, we did identify a few changes as we went through here. We eliminated a few grades. So when this work started um initially it was before a lot of the minimum wage adjustments uh within the state and so the bottom of the pay structure we just took out had to make some other uh changes there too to just make sure that that was uh staying competitive and then we also narrowed the steps for a couple of those jobs too. So we narrowed the range and narrowed the steps uh as as a part of that. Really what we saw is the range

was pretty wide. As it got wide, even though you're trying to pay at the market 75th percentile, your starting pay really wasn't giving you any advantage. And so over time, there had been a lot of processes to allow employees to come in above that entry step. And so we just clean that up by bringing up that minimum so that your starting pay is going to be more competitive. But that maximum did not move up. It's kind of staying close to where it was before. So trying to balance some of the flexibility around that. Okay, as we look to the fire and police uh structures within these, we did try to match the similar um these are really job- based pay ranges. So when we looked at that staff, we're really looking at a structure to help simplify administration jobs will be classified uh and I'll talk more about that into those pay grades. Within police and fire, it is a complete alignment between the job title and the pay range. It's a straightforward mapping process. So again, we're looking at things like how well that starting pay matches up with the peer starting pay as well as the maximum and and number of steps. This is really just as the market data as we've gathered it and try to flow it through. So there's a few things that look a little odd. Um if you look at the sorry the the fire captain compared to the firefighter, it's a pretty big jump and then it flattens out. So there might be some smoothing. This still has not been reviewed with the um bargaining unit. So, it's really just our market data as we've gathered it and influed it through uh at this point, but overall it will look similar if you're familiar with what those structured looked like previously, but we are just anchoring to make sure that starting pay and maximum pay best reflects the market data that we gathered. There's another pay structure specific to the executive team. So, as we evaluated that, it's going to look similar as well, but what we saw is the ranges were pretty wide on that, too,

which meant it's pushing up that maximum pretty high and then the minimum wasn't really appropriate. So, we just tighten that up to formalize it and then also just make sure that that maximum pay is again well aligned, but looks pretty similar to what you have in place. Now, there's also separate part-time structures. There is uh uh two separate structures for the seasonal and uh regular part-time employees. So those are listed here. Again, as we look through that, we didn't have a lot of disruption here. This is a group where there's not a lot of concerns about hiring or turnover. It's pretty stable. There were wide ranges, too. And the nature of those part-time, you know, seasonal roles, you didn't see employees moving far through the range. And so we just formalized by capping that a little bit smaller by taking off a few of the the top grades. Uh they just weren't being used that that often. So I mentioned earlier for uh the staff jobs, we have them placed in the salary structure to simplify administration when we looked at public safety. Each job title has a range that's too much to carry forward for the staff jobs. So the way that we place jobs into the salary structure is we look at the relationship between the market 75th percentile pay and the grade midpoint. And so jobs just round up or round down based on the nearest match. Uh so we have an example of that on the right where if you take that sample job XYZ with the market data of 35,455 that's going to round up to the grade two midpoint. This is just sample data here. It's a little bit below that grade two midpoint, but it's closer to that than grade one. And if we had another job with market data of 36,200, it would round down into grade two. So on the staff structure, we have grades that are comprised of jobs that have similar market data.

So I have a a series of uh charts that look similar to this that I'll go through where within each salary structure, we're plotting current employee pay within those ranges. So to set up this first one, that gray line going through the middle represents the midpoint of the pay grade. And then we have the bars on the left and right that represent the minimum and maximum pay. Each dot here is one employee and it shows where their pay falls within these proposed pay ranges. Uh so by bringing up that minimum, we are seeing some employees that are now below that range minimum. So there's going to be some costs as we look forward to bring them to that minimum line. Um and then just that that one dot that's above the the range maximum as we look to the fire kind of similar dynamic where uh we have some dots that are to the left of that minimum line. There are uh more employees here than these dots might indicate. Right? So you have a step structure. A lot of employees are falling at that same point. Uh but we do see that there's adjustments at the bottom end of the pay scale that's going to have some of those firefighters and captains then below the minimum of the range. Similar dynamic as we look to the police step structure. Um you know I I think probably with Prop P however many years ago there's just been a lot of money coming into public safety. So we've seen these pay ranges move quite a bit over the years. Um so we're seeing that with the police structure here as well. with the executive structure some below minimum as well. Uh so we got the four dots there. We'll we'll look at the cost behind that. Um but really you don't see that employees have hit that midpoint or progress well beyond that. That is the only structure where employees are not tied to a step. So there's open movement within that that pay range. And then we have the part-time structures. So uh some below men as we've reclassified some jobs to better

align with the market data. a couple of observations below the max as we eliminated some of those top grades. Um but but very very few. So you can see you don't really use above the midpoint within this part-time structure. So wanted to present those slides just to show you that highle visual and then if we put that all together we have some of the cost totals on here. So the way that we break this out initially is looking at what is the cost to bring employees to the minimum of the pay grade and we don't have a lot of employees that fall below hold on sorry the the below min cost is relatively low. Um, so you see that listed here at the 34,132 or 2.7% of payroll. Sorry, these numbers are looking off. We did have a few employees above max. Sorry, we went through this and there's some employees above max. That is not a significant part of the cost. The more significant cost is whenever we change a step structure, there's a certain cost with adopting that to make sure employees are listed at a current step. So, we have a process where we're giving an increase to round employees up to the nearest step. Um, we also looked at some other strategies on how to implement maybe matching their current step, things like that. Those had higher costs. So aligning employees to the nearest step is really the most uh cost favorable way to look at the implementation. So as we do that, there's $700,000 in cost there or 3.1% of payroll. And then if you put that all together, that's where we get the 736,000 or the 3.7% of payroll. That is just to adopt the pay structure. Currently, you

have a salary review process that is based on the employees anniversary. So you see those salary increases come in throughout the year. Um you know monthly you're going to have that experience as well coming in uh following this implementation. We also evaluated total compensation to I to to put some of the pay data into context of the broader total rewards package. At a high level, when we compare base pay to the 75th percentile, you're about 10% below that goal. So, we're showing that initially. As we look at the benefits, we see those is below market as well. I'll get into some of the nuance behind that as well. Not significantly below market. It's basically matching market expectations, but overall it nets out uh about 9% below market. The highlights within the benefits data specifically is the city does cover um a little bit less of the premium for health care than we would see in the market. So that's a trend both for employee only and family coverage. So that's bringing in a little bit of the difference. We do see some trends where dental and vision is subsidized by some peers but not by the city. The PTO practices are broadly aligned. So we look at that at common tenure uh tiers as employers would get acrew vacation time. In some cases it matches well. In other cases it falls behind and then it catches back up again but pretty close. There's one fewer holiday observed than the peer data. And then uh most of the peers are going to maintain a loggger's plan for their pension. So there is two of the peers that do not. And then the majority as well offer some form of education reimbursement that might max out at, you know, a little over $5,000 a

year, but that's not a feature that the city has as well. So overall, I think that the benefits package is pretty well aligned with the market. There might be some opportunities here and there to address some things. um but it's not the case where it's um you know above d the peer data and you know meaningfully driving the total comp comparison. Okay. So with that just want to highlight some of the recommendations. So what we would say first is to adopt the salary structures. So the new ranges, minimums, number of steps, all of that. Um to implement the compensation philosophy to make sure that starting pay is well position maximum pay is appropriate. Um increase all employees to the minimum of the range. So there's not a lot of costs tied with that. Most of it is going to be trying to uh address getting employees aligned to a step. So we're going to see more costs uh with with that piece. And then a couple of the annual best practices is to annually adjust the pay structures. So there you have been doing this in recent years to make sure that the structure is moving to match market trends. We know that the market's going to continue to move. So by updating your minimums and maximums, it's going to keep market alignment and then making sure that those step increases are aligned with overall salary increases within the market as well. And so we'll provide an annual salary and planning letter annually to show what we're seeing in survey data or government data on how wages are moving just to make sure that you're well aligned with those trends. Okay. I think that was the last slide before questions. Okay. Uh thank you very much for your presentation, Joe. Are there questions from members of council uh of our presenter this evening? Council member Clay.

Thank you, Mayor Crow, and thank you for the presentation. Uh, when you were comp uh looking at peer data for fire specifically, did that include protection districts or just municipally run? Municipally. Yeah, it was it was just the municipal um peers that we had outlined on. Okay. So the so the folks that you had in the uh the peers that you had listed that that was for fire as well. So there's no

correct. Yeah. So, so I mean as you know not all of them ha not all of those peers have fire uh operations within the city and uh we do know that the fire protection districts um pay very competitively right and so I think that's one of the the reasons and honestly like this one of the challenges is that a lot of the peers also want to set their fire department pay to the 75th percentile as a way to as a nod to be competitive with the fire protection districts. And so when all of your peers are benchmarking at the 75th percentile, that's like a a tough dynamic to stay competitive within that. But it is it does not include the fire protection districts. Yeah.

Other questions? Council member McMahon. Thank you, Mayor. Maybe maybe I missed it in the presentation, but with the the folks the the larger cost of catching people up to the steps, did those fall in number-wise? Was there a breakdown of the percentage between fire and police, the uniform versus uh non-uniform?

Yeah. Yeah. So over 50% of the costs are within police and fire. Um, and I think that tracks it. It's a little bit more than how the payroll tracks, right? So, police and fire make up a lot of the the employee population. Um, but it is uh disproportionate to those two groups. Most most of the fees are coming there. So most of that shifting towards the uniform side is just that their pay structures higher to begin with for starting salaries and and steps already then we can get them to the steps. It's just adding more but number-wise was it they were more we needed to get more of those folks to their step than than staff.

Correct. Okay. Yeah. and um w within that. So we didn't what we presented here is not to maintain current step but just so so we could see some retreat where an employee that was at step six might be at step three now as the structure moved.

If I can take just a couple of questions myself. Um, we had a you'd mentioned a few a very small number of people that were above their range. If they were above their range, is that something that from my corporate background that would take the city manager's initials or someone's initials to go above the range or how did that come about?

I I don't know how that came about. It it could be that employee was uh you know step back to take a lesser role or something like that. Generally what would happen there is pay would be frozen um until an employee might be eligible for an increase at some point in the future when that range would catch up. Um it also sends a signal that if the employee wants additional compensation upside they need to look to develop their skills responsibilities look for other opportunities um where they would have a higher pay range to get an increase. Again, you can well, it is it is common to do things like a lump sum adjustment in lie of a pay increase, but that can be difficult within the state of Missouri um in how some of the bonus language is within the constitution.

I'm having a hard time here. Oh, sorry. I keep moving this thing around. It it seems right in front of my face and then gets away. Um, typically you would do something like a lump sum adjustment for that scenario where you could provide a one-time payment to recognize what the employees done for the last year, but not in a way that continues to move them above the the max of the range. But the Missouri Constitution and auditors view those as a bonus and that presents some challenges. So, so typically you would just freeze pay for those employees. And then the four cities that you had asterisk beside are do they typically just they normally don't participate or is there any pattern of conduct here?

There is a pattern. Uh yeah so so they choose not to participate. Some of them just told us no. Um some of them use a service called public salary. It's a paid subscription where some cities will use to post their pay data instead of going through these survey processes. um and they say, "Hey, just go out there." But but um the city doesn't have a subscription. We can't gain access to that data. So that presents a challenge, too. Um but yeah, it's it's a trend that some of these just don't like to share their data or they don't. Sometimes there's turnover and they don't have the staff to do it. And this may be a a question more for Miss Sharp or for uh some of the directors, but in either doing exit interviews or reasons employees left, how often was salary the driver? I'm I think when we have conversations like this, we assume salary is always the driver. Yet, I think we recognize that as far as job turnover, I think there are a number of factors that go towards whether the employee wants to stay or wants to go. Uh, honorable Mayor Crow, I would uh defer to HR on this, of course, but in the five years I've been here, I've not heard of one person saying they were leaving because of salary. Okay.

Um, we do exit interviews with every maybe not the part-time staff, but all full-time staff. We do exit interviews. We give them a form to complete. Um she's trying to make eye contact with Amy, but we can certainly follow up with HR, but I personally had not heard of one person leaving because of salary. Okay, she gave you the thumbs up. I'll just She did. Okay.

So, so and if there's any further information, I'm sure my colleagues would like to hear that as well because I think we've always wondered what the exit interviews sort of say about how we are as a place to work. I think that's important for us to keep in mind. And then uh Mr. The other question I would have is actually in the last few years, at least sitting where we sit, we've probably been more concerned about the transitions at the leadership level than we have been at the staff level because we've had a number of department directors that have transitioned out. So again, in that scenario, we seem to be competitive paywise with being able to bring qualified employees back in to fill those roles. Well, mine would I can go on that part as well. Mine was that I I I look at us that that our turnover in the past couple of years has probably caused us greater concern at the department director level

than it has further down because we've had turnover. And so I'm assuming again in this particular case it's probably not necessarily doesn't look like salary is the issue but could be.

It it could be. I mean, I think one of the one of the, you know, in in that chart, most of the dots are to the left of that midpoint line. And so, it could be with the open ranges that there might need, you might need more flexibility that as you bring someone in low within the range that you have the right method to move them through. Um, you know, whereas in the staff structure, that's going to take nine or 10 years within the public safety um six years or so. it could take 2530 years if you're given 3% salary increases to get those employees through the range and so they could just be stalled out. Now getting that range minimum might help with some of that that you're going to bring in more competitively. Um but but that was noticeable when we looked at it. And then finally we we were at the 75th percentile was the our goal. Do you find that with most of the municipalities of our size at that same level or are they not?

It is um it's it's certainly split. There are several peers. Um need to look at the peer list. I think we see it more frequently for municipalities that have a fire department where they just really feel the the pressure to stay competitive with the few other municipalities that have fire departments and the fire protection districts and then as you do that you run into the challenge of parody between police and fire which is always something that um those groups tend to keep an eye on. So I think there's a correlation that those the department the the cities with fire departments tend to skew a little bit higher uh in how they match the market and then you're left with okay and then what what do we do with the staff? Do we take that same mentality? So uh uh as a percentage breakdown I don't have that to to share but it is it is uh somewhat probably more common within the municipalities here than we would see in other markets. Are there other questions of Mr. Rice? Miss Sharp.

If there are no other questions, uh, next steps for this would be to incorporate it into the fiscal year 27 budget. Um, we will be sharing this information with the police and fire unions. As you all know, we are in active negotiations with them. So, um I did commit to sharing it tomorrow once it was presented to you all and then uh I will be working uh along with Chris with our budget consultant to uh see what this looks like for us once we incorporate it into the fiscical year 27 budget.

If there's nothing else, Mr. Rice, thank you very much for joining us this evening. We will be back at 6:30 for the regular session. Thank you.