Title
Consider Assessor's Request Regarding Certificate Pay
Recommended Action
I move that the Council adopt the following levels of compensation for Assessor staff that achieve the relative levels of certification described in NMSA 4-39-5:
For Appraiser I Certificate: $_____________ (up to $500)
For Appraiser II Certificate: an additional $_____________ (up to $1,500)
For Appraiser III Certificate: an additional $_____________ (up to $2,500)
For Appreaiser IV Certificate: an additional $_____________ (up to $3,000)
and that these amounts be equally divided per pay period and paid from the property valuation fund.
I further move that the requirements for certification levels be removed from the Assessor's Office job descriptions, that the current pay scale for these positions be reduced by the same relevant amounts for each required level of certification, and that these changes be implemented for the Fiscal Year beginning July 1, 2017.
County Manager's Recommendation
The following discussion is from the perspective of the County Manager and due to its complexity please review the recommendations at the end of the narrative.
Body
During the salary survey conducted in 2015, a question was raised by the County Assessor's office regarding whether or not the employee's of that department were receiving "certificate pay". Certificate pay is allowed under state statute (see attachment A) relevant to an employee's attainment of a certain level of training, yet also requires approval of the County Council in a specified amount up to a defined maximum. The Assessor also asserted that the most recent Valuation Plan (submitted to and approved by Council during the prior month of March) approved the payment of certificate pay and called for this to be paid from their Reassessment Fund. Upon review of the language in the 2015 valuation plan, it does call for the approval of the source of payment, yet it does not specifically approve the certificate pay as required by state statute.
It must be noted that this same subject arose in 2004, with a very similar assertion by the then-Assessor Leo Barraza. The minutes of that meeting are included as Attachment B. The direction provided by Council at that time was for the County to pay a "one-time-only" certificate pay to the employees of the Assessor's office, for the job descriptions to be updated to include the requirement of certification, and for a salary study to be conducted once such updates were made. The County's files show that shortly after that decison by Council, the job descriptions of the Assessor's staff were updated to include requirements for employees of the department to have certain levels of certification, dependent upon the individual position. Other than the incorporation of the requirement into the job description and the subsequent salary surveys and related adjustments, no additional "certificate" pay has been provided to the employees of the Assessor's office since that time.
At the time of the 2015 survey-related discussion, it was noted that the job descriptions for each position within the Assessor's Department included the requirement of specific levels of certification for employment. As such, it would be counter to County personnel practices for an employee to obtain additional payment for a certification that is a requirement for employment. It was further noted that since the job descriptions were used for comparison purposes during the salary survey, that the requirements for these certifications would influence the relative comparison of salaries with our comparator agencies.
There is potential for employees to be compensated for certifications exceeding these base requirements, yet this potential varies by each individual job description within the Assessor's department as the minimum qualifications vary by position. Doing so, however, would again require that the County Council formally approve the compensation for certificate pay and at which rate. Research into County minutes has not produced evidence of this action having ever taken place, however given the 2004 conversation/action as well as subsequent approvals by Council of job descriptions and salary survey results, it can be assumed that the Council has at the minimum approved compensarion for the certification levels required within the job descriptions. The level of certificate pay remains a question, however, as the maximum allowed level of compensation for the various certifications was increased by the state legislature in 2015. If you follow the logic of this paragraph, one would infer that the current rates of compensation would be at the former $3,500 maximum level, while the new law increased the potential maximum compensation to $7,500.
The question of whether staff are being compensated for their levels of certification is therefore multi-faceted. As stated above it is the position of the County's HR staff that due to the inclusion of the requirements for certification pay within the the department's various job descritpions, coupled with salary surveys conducted utilizing these job descriptions, the Assessor's staff are currently being compensated for the required levels of certification in each job description. In order to demonstrate this perspective, HR staff had to conduct an independent and alternate survey of pay scales for positions within Assessor departments across New Mexico as the issue of certificate pay is not contained in the laws of other states, and many of the surveyed entities in the 2015 Salary Survey were located in these other state jurisdictions.
The results of this investigation are included in Attachment F. If you scroll to the bottom of the page for each job description, you will note that last line represents the comparison of each LAC position to the average of their counterparts' salaries, after incentive pay has been removed from both our salaries and that of the responding counties. For five of the six positions, the result of this analysis demonstrate that the current salaries of our employees exceed the current salaries of their counterparts by 27.5% to 36.9%, depending upon the position. For the remaining position, that of Chief Appraiser, the current LAC salary exceeds the average of the respondents by 6.5%, when excluding any certificate pay. For each of the LAC positions, the current statutory (2015) maximum allowed amounts were removed to demonstrate the maximum potential disparity. These results would argue that the majority of the empoyees of the Assessor's department are currently being compensated at a rate that far exceeds the average of our comparison NM counties, whether or not the issue of certificate pay is included. It also demonstrates that in order to provide equity across all positions within the department, the salary of the Chief Appraiser requires some consideration, yet such consideration does not require action by Council, as that authority resides with the County Manager.
In discussions with the Assessor, it was communicated that his staff conducted their own survey of county salaries (see Attachment D), and their results were different. Without going into significant detail regarding our comparative methods of collecting information, the basic difference was that HR's survey involved the use of published data and IPRA requests, whereas in the Assessor's staff report, it is stated that their methods involved verbal and face-to-face communication with the various departments across the state (see attachment C). Please also note that there is a difference in the total number of Counties surveyed, as well as for certain positions the Assessor chose to use positions that did not share the same job title, but in his opinion demonstrated comparable duties. Both parties shared their information, but neither fully accepted the results of the other survey.
This is a complex issue that has since morphed into a discussion that was not part of Council's direction in April of last year. In the attached report created by the Assessor (see Attachment E), there is information regarding the relative pay of other county positions as compared to the Assessor's "survey" of similar positions in other New Mexico Counties. As described earlier, the recent exercise required our HR staff to conduct a new survey of NM County positions only, whereas the approved Salary Plan and 2015 Salary Survey focused on comparisons that included out-of-state agencies and relied on our relative recruitment areas. In other words, the placement of these identified positions were not intended to be compared to the salaries of the entities that the Assessor's staff collected. To suggest that they should now be compared in this fashion is inconsistent with our Salary Plan, as in this salary plan there are three series of positions established relative to the population from which we wish to recruit. For the 100 level series, we recruit locally and therefore attempt to benchmark our salaries against such local competitor agencies, for the 200 series we do similarly on a regional level, and for the 300 series we seek to do so on a national basis. Inevitably, there will be a disparity when anyone attempts to use our current salary plan to compare against an alternate paradigm.
There are a couple of potential paths forward. The Assessor recommends that Council approve Certification Pay levels and that these payments be made from the Property Valuation Fund, which is outside of the County's general fund. His recommendation is to then change the job descriptions to remove the requirements for certification. The concern is that these actions should be linked, and that if the job descriptions are altered, the pay scale for each job description should also be reduced in an amount similar to the relative certificate pay level, specifically due to the aforementioned survey results. In addition, there would be potential for employees in the positions that currently require less than a level four certification to end up with an increase in total pay relative to their current pay. The main issue here is that in the Assessor's staff report, it is unclear how such adjustments will be made as the motion only considers the establishment of certificate pay. The motion proposed above attempts to clarify these concerns.
Alternatives
The Council could choose to adopt one of the motions proposed by the Assessor in Attachment C, or take no action at all.
Fiscal and Staff Impact/Planned Item
Dependent upon the chosen action, the impact to the General Fund will vary given the question of whether or not to reduce the current pay scales as part of the action. In any of the proposed cases, the Property Valuation Fund would be reduced annually by the cumulative value of the approved incentives.
Attachments
A - State Statute (NMSA 4-39-5 NMSA (2015))
B - 2004 Staff Report and Minutes
C - Assessor's Staff Report
D - Assessor's Staff Salary Survey
E - Assessor's Survey of Other County Positions
F - HR State Salary Survey
G - Assessor's Office Job Descriptions