County shouldn’t compound manager’s salary range COLA mistake
County shouldn’t compound manager’s salary range COLA mistake
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County shouldn't compound manager's salary range COLA mistakeCounty Executive PJ Wendel could have exercised a bit of fiscal conservatism on Saturday by vetoing a Local Law that creates mandatory cost-of-living-adjustments to the top and bottom salary ranges for management employees .
Wendel chose not to do so – and it's something we hope county residents remember moving forward.
Let us be clear – we think management employees should be treated fairly. Those who deserve yearly raises should receive them. But management employees also know what the salary ranges for their positions are when they move into management, and the upper ranges of these salary ranges are pretty generous when one considers the health and retirement benefits that are attached to them.
Attaching cost-of-living adjustments to salary ranges is one reason costs continue rising – and sooner or later the tax increase train will be coming to Chautauqua County government because we aren't doing a good enough job of holding the line on costs that are well within the control of Chautauqua County government.
County legislators have the opportunity to compound what we feel is September's mistake with mandatory COLAs for management salary ranges by converting unused sick time into additional health insurance coverage after a management employee retires. A local law to be discussed in October would require the county to match the benefit given to the highest county union collective bargaining unit agreement.
We’re not convinced this local law should advance at all, but it certainly needs to have an income cutoff. The salary ranges approved this year include upper-level managers earning up to $207,184 and some ranges that start at $70,000 and advance through the years to $108,563 at the top of the salary range. The argument for managers earning $40,000 at the bottom of the manager salary scale is much different than the argument for those earning in the upper range of managers.
Let’s not forget that the median household income in Chautauqua is $58,351, according to Census data. The per capita income, the average amount of money earned per person in the county, is $32,691. Those are the average salaries of the average taxpayers expected to pay for more largesse for government employees who needed more money at the top and bottom of the salary ranges, to have yearly changes to those salary ranges based on inflation and now to have longer taxpayer-funded health care benefits when they retire.
In June 2016, there were 56,000 people employed in Chautauqua County. That number is now 55,400 – a pretty steady number given the economic headwinds we have seen over the past decade. Yet, at the county level, Chautauqua County employed 1,267 employees in 2016. That number has grown to nearly 1,500 in 2026. Taxpayers have been asked over the past 10 years to support a growing number of county employees, and now county government is asking taxpayers to pay that growing number of employees more in the form of regularly increasing wages and better benefits – in a budget, we might add, that is using $11 million of the surplus to eliminate a tax increase this year. .
The increased number of county employees over the past 10 years is almost 20%. How can Wendel and the legislature justify this increase when the county has seen several major employers leave over that period of time? It's called the taxpayer tree. We would venture to say that there isn't one private entity that has had a 20% increase in employees over the past 10 years. We'd ask the county Industrial Development Agency, or should we call it the county non-Industrial Development Agency, but we already know the answer. Now the county wants to both pay more and add retirement sweeteners to county managers.
The only thing really developing is the county's payroll. In our opinion it should be a significant problem when that's the only thing the county is really developing.