Workshop:
You may have heard that we carried out a compensation study? I think it’s a good idea to pay people a healthy salary, so this seems fine to me.
First off: not everyone is included. Specifically, appointees, SMPD, and Firefighters are not excluded. (SMPD and firefighters are the only public employees that Texas allows to have unions that negotiate for higher salaries.)
So for everyone else, we brought in some consultants. Here’s the process:
So when you get to that pentagon in the middle, you need some way to quantify the importance of a job. Here’s how they do it:
Magically, those factors turn into some number of points between 0 and 3000.
So are we currently paying people fairly?
The thing about this graphic is that all those dots hug the line fairly closely. That means that roughly speaking, if two people are doing comparable jobs, they’re getting paid a comparable amount. This is good!
If you trust the point system, then we’re internally consistent with that.
So how do we compare to other cities? We picked 107 of our job descriptions to compare.
So Austin pays much better than we do, and we pay a little better than New Braunfels.
Sidenote: this slide is total gibberish. First off, “variance” is how spread out your data is. I’m pretty sure they’re not trying to convey that Austin is 20% less spread out than San Marcos, and New Braunfels is 4% more spread out, because that would be a silly thing to emphasize. So I think they’re actually comparing the averages, or maybe the average trend line.
Second, the left hand side is an even bigger mess. Did they actually measure different things in 2023 and 2024? how did they measure 2024 anyway? And then for total variance… they added together 2023 and 2024? What would that even mean?!
Back to the presentation.
Finally, they took seven of those cities, and inferred what their scatter plot lines would be. Then they compared our trend line to these other cities:
This means we pay a little better for anyone earning up to $50,000, and we pay a little worse if you’re earning 50K-200K.
They tactfully didn’t specify how much the folks on the top will be getting, and I actually don’t care. None of this is the kind of obscene amounts of wealth that actually offends me.
On the lower end, increasing the hourly pay from $16 to $17.42 translates into a yearly income going from $32,000 to $34,840.
Still living in poverty! Still eligible for those low-income LIHTC apartments we just talked about. But moving in the right direction, I suppose.
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There was also a nice presentation on our grants development process and grant activity. The grants coordinator seems to be coordinating a lot. It seems like an awfully wonky topic even for a blog like this, though, so I’m letting it go.
The San Marxist 