Megan Stewart
In an effort avoid laying off city staff, all five City of Sweet Home department heads volunteered to forego their annual 3 percent salary boost in hopes of preventing layoffs, City Manager Ray Towry told City Council members at their meeting Tuesday, June 9.
Towry, Public Works Director Greg Springman, Finance Director Brandon Neish, Police Chief Jeff W. Lynn, Library Director Rose Peda, and Community Development Director Blair Larson have all promised to relinquish their officially known as the annual Cost of Living Adjustment, or COLA, if Sweet Home does not meet its property tax revenue goal in November, due to the effects of the coronavirus.
The COLA salary boost is technically not a raise. Rather, it is a way to reimburse city officials for the money they lose to inflation every year, funded through the tax revenues in various local departments, Towry said.
Because Sweet Home’s tax rates are the lowest in the state, the city’s department heads earn 5 percent less than officials in similar-sized cities. Combine that with last year’s inflation rate of 2.55 percent, and the disparity increases to almost 8 percent, “a substantial drop” in each of their paychecks, Towry said. The annual 3 percent COLA helps close this gap.
Towry said concerns about the pandemic’s toll on both the city and its citizens’ financial situations initially sparked the discussion. Faced with massive tax revenue decreases across many departments, including decreases in state-wide revenues that usually trickle down to local governments, the Sweet Home department heads wondered what each of them could personally do to help.
They did not want to follow neighbor cities, such as Lebanon, Albany and Portland, in laying off government employees.
Towry said he volunteered his COLA first, but none of the other department heads hesitated in joining the cause, not even after they were asked to sleep on the decision and confer with their families before fully committing.
Since then, two middle managers have agreed to follow suit, with the potential for more to do the same, Towry said, but he didn’t want to name them to protect the privacy of others, who declined.
As of now, with five department heads and two middle managers in agreement, the savings total $27,157, almost an entire year’s FTE salary for some city employees. If all the middle managers consent, the total would rise to $35,000.
Towry said he and the other department heads “want to do their part” to help their employees, who he described as “essential pieces of the puzzle that help our communities run.”
“This is a pretty impressive group of people here to volunteer to do that,” he told the council last week.