A Std-Ex Editorial Cheap Shot at the 2007-08 Emerald City Pay Plan

Did the Emerald City Administration "Give Away the Store?"

By Curmudgeon

The Standard-Examiner today has a lead editorial attacking the recently announced pay raises for Ogden city workers [$3000 per worker plus the city will pay the anticipated 7.5% increase in medical insurance costs for each as well.]

The Std-Ex editorial says:

The thing we'd like to know is: How many average workers in the private sector are getting $3,000 raises this year? And, the editorial concludes: The thing that seems to be getting lost in this discussion between elected leaders and city employees is that this is taxpayer money. As we've urged before, raises ought to be reasonable and mirror, more or less, averages in the private sector. This money comes from Ogden businesses and residents. The city should be exercising much more discipline than this in an effort to be fiscally responsible.

The Std-Ex editorial page has been doing remarkably good stuff of late, but this time they've gone off the rails. They've decided that pay raise constitutes squandering the public's money because the raise is greater than raises being offered to private sector employees this year, they think. And so they conclude it's excessive.

There is so much [potentially] wrong with that conclusion it's hard to know where to begin. For openers, it ignores [by not even asking about] the size of pay increase for city employees over, say, the last five years. IF those raises were lower than the cost of living, then city workers have been falling behind and this year's raise constitutes a "catch up" provision to make up for under-payments previous years.

Is that true? I don't know. But, apparently, neither does the Std-Ex. All the editorial board looked at apparently is the size of this year's raises. Finding the information to assess the wisdom [or it could be lack of wisdom] in this year's raise package would of course require some research... which evidently the SE editorial board chose not to do. Much easier to just criticize in the absence of the research needed to support their conclusions.

The city raises will result in a much higher rate of raise for lower paid city employees [say firemen and police men and others] and a much higher rate of raise for those in the upper levels of city administration. Another three K for somebody earning 30K a year is a 10% raise. But a 3K raise for someone earning [or, if you prefer, receiving] 90K a year is a little over 3%. Hey, I'm all for that --- people on the lower end of the pay scale getting higher percentage raises than those on the upper end. It's the one good thing about flat across the board raises: it sends the bulk of the money to those who need it most. The Std-Ex though seems to be unhappy with that.

OK, there are other ways to do it. One option is to distribute most of the pay raise money by merit... the Std-Ex doesn't like either, apparently, since the editorial criticizes the city for having done that a couple of years ago too. Or you can distribute raises by rate [rather than flat amount]. Say, everyone gets a 4% raise... but that puts more money into the hands of the very highly paid than it puts into the hands of the lower paid. SE doesn't seem to like that either. [The editorial is unhappy with the 2005 raise package with combined merit pay with an across the board percentage raise.]

Finally, the Std-Ex scoffs at Mr. Patterson's explanation that the city will benefit from the raises, and maybe it will end up not costing much at all, because fewer trained and experienced city employees with jump to other municipalities which pay more. [Firemen and policemen for example.] Well, if the Std-Ex wants to scoff, perhaps it ought first to do a little research [always advisable before reaching a conclusion in print]. What is the turnover rate for public employees in Ogden now? What's it been for the last five years? What is it in municipalities with which we compete for employees? What has it been for the past five years? What is the pay rate for various categories of civil servants in the top of Utah? What are the comparable pay rates in Ogden?

I don't know the answer to those questions, but before I published an editorial denouncing a recent raise package as unjustified and a squandering of the public's money [and trust], I would damn well want to know. The Std-Ex editorial provided none of that information, and so none of the evidence that might have made its editorial's conclusions convincing and compelling.

Instead, the Board chose the easy cheap shot: denouncing raises for city workers without bothering to examine the evidence to see if they were justified or not.

Hmmmmm... reaching conclusions without doing the research necessary to ground those conclusions on fact and evidence. Is the Std-Ex Editorial Board taking reasoning lessons from the Godfrey Gondola team now?