PORT ANGELES — Seven top Clallam County government officials could receive raises of $4,000 to $6,000 in 2009 if county commissioners bring their salaries up to average.
An eighth — County Administrator Jim Jones — could get a $21,000 boost next year.
Two of three more officials, however, said they weren’t interested in more money.
The question of salaries arose at a county commissioners’ work session Monday.
Jones presented the cases for all but his raise, explaining that they represented the end of a two-year effort to bring Clallam’s pay scales in line with Washington counties of similar size.
Those are Cowlitz, Island, Lewis, Grays Harbor, Mason and Jefferson, whose populations range from 97,800 to 28,600 — compared with Clallam’s 68,500.
County wage earners’ increases already were implemented Nov. 1, Jones said, which will boost their collective pay by about $400,000 this year and $700,000 next year.
Increases for administrators would total nearly $52,000 in 2009, he said.
First survey since 2001
“We’ve been working for the past two years on a bottom-to-top review of the salary structures of every position in the county,” Jones said.
The last such survey was taken in 2001.
“It has been our plan all along that we would do the elected officials and department heads,” he added.
County commissioners’ pay was fixed in 1999 with a 2 percent annual cost of living adjustment.
Jones proposed raising their salaries to equal those of the elected county assessor, auditor, treasurer and community development director — from about $61,000 to $67,560.
None of the current commissioners — Mike Doherty, D-Port Angeles, Steve Tharinger, D-Dungeness, and Mike Chapman, independent-Port Angeles — could receive a raise unless he were re-elected to terms starting in 2011, 2012 and 2013, respectively.
Not money hungry
Neither Chapman nor Doherty said he was eager for a raise.
“I don’t have a bit of interest at all in it,” said Doherty, “but we should talk to Steve.”
He referred to Tharinger, who was absent from Monday’s meeting.
“I think this is really bad form of the commissioners to raise their own pay,” Chapman said.
“I think we should be less than the other departments,” whose elected or appointed heads supervise large staffs of employees, he said.
Jones recommended no raises for any department head making more than the six-county average or making less than 2.5 percent below that average.
They included the county assessor, auditor, treasurer, information technology director and juvenile services director.
5 percent more for most
He recommended raises ¬– with exact numbers depending on rank in range — to make up a 14 percent underpayment to county commissioners, and 5 percent raises for the sheriff, Superior Court clerk, county engineer, public works director, human resources director and health and human services director.
Chapman presented the results of the survey for county administrator, a position that none of the comparable counties fills.
However, an average of nine other county administrators’ salaries came to nearly $132,000, and the average pay for the CEOs of seven other public agencies in Clallam County was nearly $139,000.
Jones earns about $105,000 a year.
Staying put
“I can’t take a 34 percent raise,” Jones said. “That’s ridiculous.”
And when Chapman said Jones might be lured away — the administrator said he’d been wooed by “headhunters” looking to replace other administrators — Jones said he wasn’t about to leave the county at whatever price.
“I have no intention of using it as a step stone to somewhere else,” he said.
“I have no intention of going anywhere.”
However, hiring a replacement for himself could be problematic, he said.
“I look at it more as, ‘If I were run over by a truck . . .'” he said.
Stinginess can raise other troubles, Jones said, citing another local government whose administrative candidates on Saturday all spurned the compensation they were offered.
“We saw just what happened in Sequim,” he said.
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Reporter Jim Casey can be reached at 360-417-3538 or at jim.casey@peninsuladailynews.com.
