We'll call this meeting to order at 07:01PM. Roll call. Gustafsson. Here. Leahy. Here. Meyer. We're awaiting him. Melke. Here. Wossenberg. Here. Linehan. Here. Alright. The, approval of the agenda, any changes to tonight's agenda? None there. Okay. Do I hear a motion to approve the agenda as presented and in the packet? No. So moved. So moved by Leahy. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. All those opposed same sign. Motion carries four-zero.
Tonight we have the privilege, honor or whatever presentation from DDA Human Resources Incorporated on our classification and compensation study that, we've been undergoing. And I'd like to welcome Mark Goldberg, but I'll turn this over to administrator Linehan to introduce it and, give us some background and introduce Mark. Yeah. Thank you, mayor, council, and Mark as well for being here. So a little bit about this topic. So the city,
back earlier this spring went out for a request for a proposal for a class and compensation study. And so a class and compensation study, essentially looks at the positions of the city, identifies kind of their job duties, not people, but the actual jobs, and tries to kind of make a a pay scale and also looks at our positions and determines, kind of how to set everyone up into a system. And so currently, the city of Falcon Heights does not have a traditional pay study. When we do our, our pay equity reporting every three years,
we utilize the state's job match. So we use the point systems for the state, and that's been a challenge for a year. So the city's kinda struggled through that. Most similar sized cities, you know, kinda work with a consultant to develop a plan like this. So we had identified it as a 2025 budget goal to get this. Council has long kind of known that, you know, we wanna make sure we pay fairly, that we keep good people, and this is a good, good step towards that. So went out. We found DDAHR. The I mean, they are the best at working with small cities like us and large cities as well,
and helping get them a pay plan. And we knew that we were starting from zero, so that it'd be a good team to kinda come together, help us get that. So we've been working with Mark and his team, for a few months now, getting everything together. And so tonight, Mark is going to, kind of go over the initial findings, kind of propose the general grade, talk about the market. We're not gonna get into individual positions, so we're not gonna talk about, like, a specific position. But we're gonna kinda talk about the city kind of as a whole, what it means for us, and kind of the budgetary impacts as well as we start to talk budget and
plan for that. So with that, I'll kick it over to Mark Goldberg, our, consultant with DDA. Thank you so much for that introduction, Jack. Mister mayor, council members, thank you so much for having me here. As Jack said, my name is Mark Goldberg here from DDA. I'm gonna go through everything here, but please don't feel like you need to wait till the end to ask any questions. If something is unclear or you want some more details, just let me know and we'll go through it. So DDA has been doing this for a long time, over twenty five years. And about nine, ten years ago, our clients started coming to us and asking for help with the HR piece of thing.
Before that, we've been focused on the financial aspects. And that's when my partner, Doctor. Tessa Melvin, started the class and comp group within DDA. I joined five years ago two another two months will be five years. Before that I was with Arthur J. Gallagher helping to lead their public sector compensation group, before that with University of Minnesota and the Met Council. So of my twenty nine years of doing this, over half of it is within the public sector specifically. And we have expanded so much in the last so I have been there five years. We have over tripled in the number of clients we have had in those five
years. So we are doing a lot. And right now, mayor, I saw you had the bag from LMC. LMC had a lot of information as for cities across and counties across the state. It does not anymore. Right now we have data, 2025 data from all 87 counties and approximately 175 cities. LMC has about 60 counties and 150 cities and even what they have is incomplete. So basically, if you need data within the state, market data for public sector,
we are the ones to go to. But what are we trying to do with this? We are trying to give you a class and comp system that makes sense, one that is internally equitable, meaning when you line up the jobs within the city that hierarchy makes sense and it is externally competitive. When you go to the market, we are going to talk about the market in just a minute, that it makes sense when compared to the market. Not here to cut costs or to cut people's pay. No one will ever see a pay reduction within this. We are not doing staffing or design. But we are also not saying, oh, everyone gets a 3% increase because that is not the way the market works.
We are looking and seeing kind of where people are falling compared to your peers and making recommendations based on that. So we had 17 different organizations we chose. Part of it's gonna be who's around you. I mean, that's that's going to have to be part of it, but it's also, hey, who's similar to you? Who is some other cities that provide some similar service to you? Maybe they are a little bit larger but okay, they are similar services. Medina is one of my clients and because of the Medina Ballroom and some other stuff there, they are generally marketing, you know, their markets, you know, comparisons are cities for a lot larger.
And that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. But it's also who do you lose people to and where do you recruit people from. So I believe you as a council have seen the list of cities, and you're all good with it. Okay. When we get stuff from these cities, and I think we got every one of them, many of them are our clients already, we get the actual rosters. So, you know, we have the roster for Columbus. We have well, Columbus is my client. But Centerville I mean, we're we're like, hey. You know, send us your list of employees. You don't need to fill out anything. Just send that to us, and we go through that. And then we'll go through and match everything.
And I worked very closely with Jack to say, you know, are these matches appropriate? Are these matches for a city administrator the right ones? Are these matches for a library? I don't remember if you have a library or not, but, you know, all these matches, are they the right ones for this? If we don't have at least four matches for a job, we can't tell you what the data is. Because, you know, if there's only two or three there, there's not enough there to really draw conclusions. So we're gonna go through that and say, okay, you know, is there enough here? I think what we didn't get everyone. We got what? 80%? Yeah. Most. I think besides maybe two. Yep.
So all but two. As a point of reference, when I was with Gallagher, and I'm not saying this to disparage them, but if we got like 35, 40% of the jobs matched, we felt pretty good. We're generally seventy, eighty, 90% within DDA. Here's all the matches. There's going to be some that you're not going to find data for. And unfortunately, that's always going to be the case. For those jobs that you don't have matches for, that's when the job evaluation and the classification system comes comes into play and I'll kind of talk about that in a minute. But plus or minus 10%, just so you know, is market. That's not me. That's the Department of Labor standard.
What it says is whether you're 8% below or 9% above, technically that's market because plus or minus 10 encompasses most people who are fully functional in their work, but they're paid at different rates for a lot of reasons, some of which are here. Yes, sir. Please. Please. Plus or minus 10% of what? Of the median? Yep. Of the average. Yep. Okay. The average not or not the median, the average? The it's usually it's usually the average. We're sometimes use median. I generally am I'm doing average with it. There shouldn't be if we have enough data points,
there shouldn't be a huge difference between the two of them, but it's a question of which statistical measure do you wanna use. Right. As long as there's not a lot of skew in there in the data. And we try to not if if we see data so when we're going through this Here we move to highs and lows. If we see anything that's more like than two standard deviations away, generally, we're gonna remove it and say, let's just not have this here, have it as reference, but not include it in the overall analysis because it's like, you know, if you have 10 matches for an accountant and eight of them are between 45,050, one of them is at 20,000, one of them is at 90,000, we're gonna remove them and put them in a spotlight section and say,
you know what? This is a little bit off here. You as a city could then tell me and say, you know what? I know that's really low or really high. We need to have it in there, which is perfectly fine, but we're going to remove that. And you and I went through a lot of that. So the structure we're proposing is going to put the city at about 2.4% higher on the minimums and about 4% on the maximums. That's a really good spot. That's almost an ideal spot for me to, you know, where I try to position my clients. Because if the market moves more quickly than we expect, you're still going to you're in that wiggle room. It's like, okay, you know what?
You're you're still highly competitive there right around market. So job evaluation. Jack talked about it a little bit. Everyone in the state, public sector, other than this University of Minnesota, which is exempt from it somehow, yeah, I never understood it. Even when I was there, I never understood it. They don't have to file pay equity. U of M doesn't have to file pay equity. Everybody else does. I did when I was at the Met Council, But but what it says is you have to have a job evaluation system, and you have to be able to say, here's what here's the points you're assigned to the job. Here's how we're determining the value of this job. Here's why we're putting this in a particular hierarchy.
And usually that is a basis for determining pay, at least pay ranges for the job, not necessarily actual pay. So you guys chose JET, which is what many of our clients choose. JET was actually designed specifically for the public sector, so it works exceptionally well, within it and is scalable. So you guys can use JET and Olmsted County can use JET. We can scale it for that. What it says is there's these seven factors. I'll kind of get into that within just a second. And I'm going to say this a couple times. We're looking at the job, not the person. We take the people out of it.
It's what is this position, not what is this person doing. So these are the seven factors. There are actually some sub factors behind it as well. Qualifications means what is the minimum education and experience necessary to do the job? So Jack might have a PhD in twenty five years, which is of experience, which is great and lets him do his job effectively, but if he were to leave, would you be looking at a minimum of a PhD in twenty five years or a bachelor's in five years? It's below this threshold. You ain't getting this job. Decision making says, what are the decisions inherent in this role? What do you need to make decisions around?
What is the impact on the city. If something breaks, what happens and who is ultimately going to be responsible. There's some other sub factors in there in terms of leadership and if you're in a centralized function, kind of what the impact is, but that's the core of it. Problem solving is how technical is the job to do. And similar to decision making, if something breaks, what happens to the city? Relationships, who are they talking to and what are the nature of those discussions? Are they giving directions to the bathroom or are they standing up in front of a state agency and talking about highly complex financial issues? Physical effort, how much you got to lift and how often you got to lift it.
Mental effort, how mentally focused do you need to be in your job? So, you know, are you working in an office or are you out on the highway running some heavy machinery where if you kind of lose focus for a second someone could get really hurt? And hazards and environment what are you exposed to in the job? Right? Similar, are you in the office or are you out on the highway? But even if you're in the office, if you have to stand up in front of that front desk counter and deal with the public sometimes, there are some additional hazards that can go into that as well. So, you know, we do take that into account as well. But as I said, we're only looking at the work content. How long someone's been doing the job does not matter.
How well they're doing their job does not matter. It is only the job itself, not the employee. And we use that market information as well as the job evaluation points to say how many salary ranges do we need to have and where do we want to place those compared to the market. And we say what's the minimum, what's the maximum, and where do you want to be relative to the market? Do you want to be a little bit above? Do you want to be a little bit below? At market? Kind of where do you want to be? And how wide do you want it to be? By that I mean how far is that distance from that minimum to the maximum? Most times in the state of Minnesota,
it's a step based system. Eight to 12 steps are most common, although I have done as little as four or five, and I have done, I think, about 14 or 15 in the state of Minnesota. In my career, I've done a 30 step structure. Oh, my. That, actually, council member, I got them down from 36. That's not a that is not a joke nor an exaggeration. It was a school district in Virginia, and they were at 36, and I was trying to get them down to, like, mid twenties. The best I could do was 30. And some places will say we need to have really wide salary ranges because we don't want anyone to be outside the salary range maximum. There was a school in Florida I worked with that had 120% range width,
meaning that minimum was, let's say, 50,000, the maximum was a 120,000. Doesn't mean anything. It's a at that point, it's a broadband structure. Broad but it's it's an organizational philosophy, and it's not for me to pass judgment on that. I can be really creative. Most times in Minnesota, it's between 28 38. So as I said, we use that to create salary ranges. It's not one job per salary range. There's usually going to be at least some of the ranges several jobs. So there might be a job in police department and one in administration in grade
eight let's say. And you say, Wait, how can that be? Well, when we evaluate the job, when we look at the number of points that come out, okay, the number of points are roughly the same perhaps. So they should be in the same salary range when you evaluate it internally. And you want to make the salary range wide enough so that the market for those jobs can be fit in there. So you guys have eight grades. Your grades are anywhere from 2% to 4% oh, the steps actually are 2% to four percent apart from each other. That's not the grades. The range width is 29.83%. You heard me say 28% to 38% is most common,
so you guys are right there. If you're wondering about why is that 29 in the top left hand corner highlighted, it's the key cell. If I change that from 29 to 30 or to 28, everything else will automatically calculate off that. And when Jack and I talked about how to design this, many of my clients are doing what you guys did here which is a little bit higher increases earlier in the structure. So you can see from step one to step two it's 4% but from step nine to step 10 it's 2% different. Well, the reason is you want to get people up to a market competitive rate as
quickly as possible. In this structure, depending on the job, step four, five, six, right around there normally is where market is for that. So you want to get people up to that market competitive rate as fast as you can. You get beyond that step seven, eight, nine, ten. Okay. You're being paid above market. That's not a bad thing. You have someone who's got twenty five, thirty years of experience. You're probably going to want to have them be up there. But they are being paid above market, so let's slow down the increases a little bit. That make sense? Mhmm. Cool. So nobody's above the salary range maximum, which is great. Two employees are below the minimum.
Bringing them up to the step one would be just under $7,000 We did talk about a number of options. The one option we went with was everyone goes up a step. So let's say Jack's hourly rate is $49.99 The next higher step would be $50 Well, then he's just getting a penny increase. But if it was $49.95 well we're not going to drop him his his, hourly rate even like a couple cents. We're only going to go forward. So it's only moving people forward. So budget impact,
dollars 2.11%, about 20,792. That's $69.21 to bring people into the salary range is included within that $20,792 So yes, just a question of does this make sense? Do you want to go forward and implement this? What questions can I address for you guys? Great. I guess, kind of while we wait, Mark, I just wanna mention too for the job evaluations of the JET, how kinda how we implemented that and did it too is each employee, looked at their job description,
some of them for the first time in a long time, went through and they analyzed all those questions. And they kinda put themselves in the matrix. And then their supervisor did the same thing for the employee as well. So kind of a really good system for them to evaluate themselves, supervisor to evaluate and help us kind of get this evaluation internally and build our internal equity too as we kind of determine, okay, which grades are which positions, kind of as we build this from scratch. And I guess another way that I've kind of looked at this is if I go back to, you know, this range,
step one or grade one step one becomes kind of effectively our full time minimum wage. Right? Right. Right. So that's like the minimum amount that we would pay a full time position in our current system. If we did, for example and there's a couple of different ways that we can this moves over time too. You know, if we do a cost of living adjustment, right, our annual COLA Right. We would take that first cell and multiply it by let's say we do 3% COLA. Mhmm. We could adjust this entire thing by, you know, up to 3%. That'd come out to be, like, 29.9,
I believe. Type in '20 2091. Yeah. So then add add that in there. I've heard of it this already. Yeah. And the whole the whole matri you know, the whole thing will will update, and so it'll move. And what we would then do is people would move through within their steps kind of in our determined time. And so that could be anywhere from every two years an employee moves a step, more likely is every year. And we could determine it could be everybody moves together on January 1 or everybody moves on their anniversary date, you know, and both have kind of some merit and we can discuss.
And that not necessary tonight, just kind of as we plan that. A lot of different things we can move around. We can move around, do we want the escalators more at the beginning, a little later? Do we wanna even it out a little bit? Because you can see kind of the step differentials of kinda 4% from year one to two, and then it kinda gets down lower and lower. That seems to be standard right now. To kinda remind everyone, we're at a very, very high aggressive at the beginning. We do 5% at six months, 5% at eighteen months. And so it's and and what we find is then employees kinda lose that those
steps over time. The nice thing is, I think we had talked about it, no or yeah. No employees at step 10. Right? And I think No. You got a couple of, like, eight, but, you know, you have no one at the very top. Yeah. And so each employee, even within their own grade. So I think it'd be multiple employees at the same grade. Right? Couple positions might be graded the same even though they're different based on those, you know, okay. Well, one required a bachelor's degree and one requires, you know, a lot of physical, you know, labor knowledge, and so they might therefore both be level threes. And so that's kind of how our system will go.
So everyone will generally benefit. I think the one thing is that's good, I guess, for the city's perspective is it's not going into this, I was very afraid we'd hear that we were very below market and need to make massive changes, and, generally, no. The biggest changes are bringing a couple of the employees who are under our minimum wage up to our new effective city minimum wage. Mark probably doesn't like that term, but it's alright. That's how I'm thinking about it. So Yeah. Two to 4% is pretty close to that's pretty close to market. That's amazingly close, actually. So that's good good news,
actually. What happens at the eighteen month step? How does that fit in? Because you're talking about annually versus We'll get rid of it. We won't be doing that. We'll we'll have to do a a a personnel policy amendment. So we'd remove these automatic post step adjustments Okay. And do kind of a generalized step adjustment as well. And I haven't this is the one I haven't really fully fleshed out. But if, you know, if we're on an annual, I don't know that we need to do it bring it up to the council level. It might be something I'll bring up with the city attorney. Right? But it's like,
annually, do we need to move somebody up a step? And I that kinda gets into the the plan a form of government where we have historically done that, where we bring, you know, hey. It's their six month. It's their eighteen month. And it's a good way to celebrate them, but we could also do that in other ways too, employee milestones and other aspects too. And just say, you know, they're running the plan. It's you know, if you wanna get into it, we can kinda dig into the public info of it, but not necessarily every year bringing an employee Right. Before for their step adjustment. Right. So, this this is great. I just wanna be clear on a few things just so everybody understands and I
understand too. My understanding is that, the grades are tied to job description. So if you're changing job, getting a promotion, let's say, from a level one to a level two or a senior to a staff or something like that, that's when you would move grades. Yes. Yeah. And so we would need to likely, one thing, you know, we'd wanna do is probably score it. Right? With, so what we do is we'd kinda reach out. That was part of their proposal with DDA is that there's a price per you know, to score a new position. Mhmm. It's not much. It's $2.50 a job or $21,000,000. So if we're, like, thinking about a job, you know, like, for example, we had kind of the, you know,
promotion director of administrative services, for example, or assistant finance director. Some of these positions that we promoted, what we do is we kinda float it, write the job description, float it to DEA. They kinda say, yeah. That's a grade x. Mhmm. So then we could kinda determine, okay. That's what it mean, and then we can have very clearly, and not just kind of, us deciding what what the pay should be. It would be Right. In a chart. Yeah. And they would know. Council member, just so you know, it's hidden in here, but there are point ranges for each one of those grades. So grade one might be from zero to a 150, and two might be,
you know, a 150 to 200. You know? So we know, okay. You know, if you have we if Jack sends me a job and I grade it and it's at five hundred points, oh, well, that's gonna be at a grade five or grade six or something like that because we have that already established. Okay. Okay. Great. And then so we establish what the grades are. The steps are well, we used to call in my other jobs merit. So tied to annual review, how your job performance is, things like that, aside from standard cost of living where I mean, you could potentially get a a raise each year even if you stay within your
same grade and step if the if the COLA is moving each year, for example. But the whole overall scale is moving each year. It's when you're doing your job better, more effectively, something like that. That's when you would move steps. Yes? Well, council member, the Mhmm. The answer is, I hang around with lawyers too much. It depends. Many places, it is an automatic step. So you might be currently at grade three. Step four, so you're at thirty six eighty one. Let's say January 1, the structure moves. Okay. So you the structure moved that amount. Would you then automatically move from step four to step five?
Most times, yes. If you have a performance evaluation system in place, then it becomes a little bit easier to say, okay, you had meets performance, so you move up. Or if you had a not meets performance, then you might be held back potentially. Mhmm. But in most cases, it is an automatic step that is not that is not always. But So it's tenure. Sorry? Ten year. It is tenure based. Yes. If you do have a performance evaluation system in place, you could tie it to performance and say you have to have x per you know, whatever performance threshold you said,
whether it's meets or exceeds Mhmm. And you move another step based on that. Otherwise, you would only receive the COLA. Okay. So I guess one of my other questions about whether these are actually the defined amounts because if it's if it's merit, it's much more graded. But if it's based on tenure, then I could see having very defined percentages and very defined amounts for x number of years in this position. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yep. And I I will say coming from another state and kind of from another system that does, you know, do a little bit more merit, Minnesota seems to really frown upon kind of the merit structure more and more,
and having it more step based is kind of is the general standard for most cities. I only have a handful of clients where it is a merit structure. Okay. That's probably of your counties. Okay. That's Usually senior sometimes senior employees and others. Oh, not for No. No. Like Olmsted and Nicklipp. It's for it's for everybody. Sure. I'm trying to think there's one other that had that had merit. There's three I know. I can't remember who the third is. Okay. So that's a significant difference between public and private sector. I'm used to private sector and this is kind of a different way of going about it. Like, where most where most is merited and very little is some companies don't even have
COLA. Yes. Correct. Yep. So it'd be purely it it's purely tenure. And then essentially what you do and, I mean, what a lot of cities will do is when they are let's say a lot of employees have all hit kind of the top of their their grades. At that point, you know, they're just doing the cost of living, and they might that might be a time that they say we need to go out and do a new pay study. Kind of everybody you know, kind of, I think, is usually how it gets to And some places don't do a COLA every year. I mean, you have to take that into account that if you are going to be having people stepping through the structure as well as the COLA, then they're basically getting two increases behind that.
Yeah. So, you know, you need to to keep that in mind and and determine what you want to, you know, look at. What I'm seeing for COLAs are anywhere from 2.5% to 3.5% for 2026. People that are signing new contracts are trying to keep it more towards like the 2.5%, 2.75%. But if you ask me for a number, it's 3% is pretty common. Yeah. Mhmm. So there's incentivize. That's the merit system, right, for and the other one is just your time. Yeah. Seniority. Yep. Yeah. So there's no incentive,
for quality of work to get your raise. No. Not for the raise. It wouldn't be tied to it. It'd be, you know, just your general job performance and maintaining your job, but it's not performance based. Right? Yeah. It's not performance based. Yeah. So if you perform poorly, there's no incentive to perform. Is there a performance improvement plan? Do you have performance improvement plans? Yeah. Yeah. What you what you could say is if you're on a performance improvement plan within the city, then you would not receive a step even if you don't have performance rating system. So that is something you could write into it. If you're on a PIP,
you ain't going from step three to step four. So there could be sticks but not carrots, essentially. Yeah. Yeah. I think there needs to be some incentive, you know, for performance in there. So we can have the six instead of the carrots already saying that. Council member Leahy, if there is a way to do that, if you do get because you don't have what performance management system in place right now from our discussion. Right? For, like, a current pay structure and stuff besides besides the like, currently, we don't. It's on longevity. So longevity is we're currently longevity based. I thought we had talked about that.
If you do put a performance management system in place, you still could have a step based structure and have what I'm calling an accelerator. So you could say, alright, Jack. You got a on a five point scale, you got a five. You're not moving from step three to step four. We're gonna move here from step three to step five. Okay. You can give an extra step based on that. Now what I would say is, again, this is all dependent on actually doing you know, getting a performance management system in place, but you could tie it through a step based system. I would also say that not just everyone who receives that highest performance rating would
automatically get that additional step. You probably want to have some discussion around, you know, do we want everyone to have that or do you know, should there be some know, you'd be eligible for having an accelerator, but you can work it into a a step system and still have the carrot in addition to the stick. And I'm not saying that we don't have staff performing well because that's all I'm seeing is excellence. But, just for putting a new system in place, having this in the mix because we never know ten years Mhmm.
Twenty years down the road when employees are gonna need that incentive to to deliver on expectation. Yeah. The the only thing, I guess, I you know, open to the idea, and it's something we could look at. The only thing I would caution, is currently we're looking at the position and not the person. Right? And so we're basing pay based on positions. Yeah. And so that would be my only cautionary, you know, is that we're looking at this position, looking at it kinda moving through the steps. If we did performance based, you know, again, there there's it can be a lot of merit, you know, especially if it was there was a minimum,
you know, percent. Like, it's not a, you know, a zero to three based on and that's usually more private sector. Right? Or, you know, zero to 10 or whatever. But that there's a minimum. The only issue is that then, you know, you kinda get some risk of inequities too, right, internally. And then we're also risking getting further off from our our own, you know, other equity. So You also risk discrimination issues. Yeah. That's what I was hearing when he was saying that. Yeah. That's what we're kinda dancing around here. Yeah. So because I I don't want us to go down that path, but I just still want to hold the standard of excellence here.
So I've just you guys seem to know how we can create that in the mix some kind of way. So and it sounds like it hasn't been there anyway. Yeah. Yeah. No. Definitely. It's not there now. I would say the biggest and, you know, probably the most important is the idea of, you know, creating new positions as well. And we've done kind of that even creatively internally. Right? And as much as, you know, moving a step is is big, moving a grade is even bigger. Right? And so if an employee does excellent performance and we can move them from grade
three to grade four Mhmm. You know, moving if you're in step one, moving from three to four, that's, you know, that's more that's multiple steps at a time. And then it also opens up a whole new horizon of, you know, hey. You can really move on. So if an employee is for example, we have a ten year employee, step three, or grade three, step 10. Right? And they're at the final kinda end of there. And we say, you know what? You've you deserved it. We're gonna move you into grade four. Well, we obviously wouldn't move them to step one because they're already beyond that.
Yeah. And so we'd essentially say, you know what? You're gonna be at step five now. That would be an increase, or we could say step six. And then they'd have kind of a a new horizon that they could continue to work on. Okay. So that I think that would be our incentive. But I'm trusting you guys on the equation there. So there's these three action sets where you're asking us are you asking us to take these tonight? Not necessarily. It's more just kind of things for you to think about. Because it feels like I would want to do one and two before doing three.
Yeah. And that that's fine too. I think what kind of tonight, honestly, it's almost you know, I know this is kinda workshoppy, but we're Yeah. It feels like there should be a workshop discussion rather than a year. Yeah. Well, it's kinda light topics right now during the fair. It would be part of it, timing of when when people can present. But for us, it is yeah. We we don't need any direct action. It's helping us come up as we kinda get to our budget workshops as we crunch this next step, is kind of, you know, giving us feedback that this looks like we're on the right path of stuff to bring. You know, kind of having a plan as to,
you know, okay. We're putting employees in this, and we we kind of have scored and and have how it'll impact employees. And, again, you know, the the budgetary impact is fairly low, and it's primarily bringing employees that are below into the system. Right. That's gonna be the primary. And the rest of most of us, it's like a slight, you know, hey. You're at, you know, $32.75 an hour. We're gonna get you we're not gonna lower you down to the next step down. We're gonna put you in step four, and you're gonna be at $32.95
an hour. Mhmm. You know? So it will be very for some employees, it's a very minimal step, but it gives them that that new Verizon. And no nobody would be unhappy with this system. System. I know. I didn't think. I I wouldn't imagine. So I'm having a I'm a little arithmetic problem here since I'm looking at this. If we talk about some kind of a COLA or or annual adjustment for the structure to keep the structure design current. Yep. And then we are also stepping people roughly a year per step. I'm not saying we're committing to any one particular time frame,
but that's kind of what this looks like over ten years. 2.5% COLA, 3% step each year. You're looking at a 5.6%. Are we institutionalizing 5.5% pay income? It's actually a little bit higher than the excess compounding that takes into effect. So it's 5.6%. That's fine. Well, when do you eventually take the COLA out? That's when you're But then your structure is no longer current. Yeah. That's also, council member, why I built it in so that you were at a little bit above market. So you're at a 102 and a 104%. Mhmm. So you have some wiggle room. So you could skip a year or so and still be okay.
That's one of the reasons why I built that in there. That is Or you could have a smaller COLA and not do a 3% COLA. You could do a one and a half or 2% COLA knowing that people will be getting those step increases as well. Okay. Mhmm. I'm just gonna go on the record. Five and a half percent annual increase kind of across the board. That's high. That's Oh, yeah. That's way high in private sector. Yeah. So Well, and higher yeah. Higher than a lot of public sector. That's that's what we might need to work on. So that's where it feels like how do you do steps and COLA and yeah. Yeah. You can't do all of them.
And council member, that's why I said some places will not do a COLA every year, that they'll Every two years kind of thing. Mhmm. Wouldn't go much more than two years, but could you do it every two years? Oh, yeah. Easily. Yeah. Yeah. And that's part of it too, is eventually you do need to run a new market analysis too. Right? And so it'll keep you for a bit, you know, knowing that we yeah. I I I wouldn't propose that we do a 3% cost of living and then also, you know, putting everybody in the steps and moving that annually necessarily. I do think the annual steps, the benefit there is that, again, it gives kind of a clear progression.
Currently, how we do it usually is a lot of times we, you know, do that, and then we employees fall out of line, and we bring them for a massive increase. Right? We bring them in and say, uh-oh. We're underpaying our you know, without naming a position. We've done this quite a bit recently. And say, hey. We're you know, our market is that we're, like, 15,000 under market. We need to adjust that, and that ends up being a a 19% increase every x number of years. So we know that we're doing that. This would just kinda bring us in so that it's not you know, I can tell you right now if any position leaves exactly what the hiring range
is. Right? I just multiply, you know, step one find their grade and multiply step step one to step 10 is the range. And it's a done deal, and it's very transparent. Mhmm. You know, and so it kinda gets us that that gives us flexibility, gives us a plan that we can work off of. But it's up to the council to do the budget every year. Right? That's a annual responsibility to the city council to evaluate. This pay plan, if we adopted it, there's obviously continuing costs with it, as is. But without a cost of living adjustment or other stuff,
it these positions will all definitely fall Yes. Out of it. So every year, we're gonna have to analyze that and see. But we can see and say, hey, with the steps, with the salary projections, you know, we're proposing that essentially our, you know, our personnel budget's gonna increase by 12% next year. We can pause and say, you know what? We don't support the four and a half percent cost of living adjustment. That's, you know, that's too high based on this. And council member, would you like a financial trick to bring the cost down a little bit? Sure. I love tricks. So Jack had mentioned there's a couple different ways to do the increases.
You can do it on a common date. January 1 or July 1 are most common. And from an administrative standpoint, people love that. From a finance standpoint, if you do it based on your anniversary date, it spreads it out over the course of the year and really brings the cost down. Now where people will complain about that is, well, I'm I was hired in January, and Jack was hired in November. And he's gonna be all upset because he's not you know, he and I are in the same grade, and he's not getting I'm he's not getting his increase until November, but I'm getting it now. People will complain about that,
but it does reduce the cost dramatically when you spread it out over like that. Yeah. It pushes everything back on average six months. No, I mean, it flattens it out a lot more. So the cost impact, I can't say exactly, but it does minimize it significantly. To go with anniversary. To go with anniversary, yes, Councilman. Yeah. It would in the first year. We've been doing anyway. Yeah. Same as it's kinda what we've been doing, everybody on the same date in in later years. I'm sorry. What was that, counselor? So I'm saying it would actually level things and kind of grade things in the
first year, but after that, you're still gonna be bringing everybody up within a calendar year. Yep. Within a calendar year, yes. Did you take a question? It's a cash flow. For one year. It becomes a cash flow issue then. It's like when is it hitting? But for year one, yeah, it actually brings it down. But then afterwards. Yes. I worked for a company that did their pay raises. They kind of walked them back a month every couple of years. So next thing you know you're getting your annual pay raise in late July. Okay. It's a technique. It is. Okay. Well, I think it's pretty clear, and I think that we can
work details on how to implement how to do these during a budget workshop. Wouldn't that make sense to kind of have it? What would be our impact of because then when you factor in a COLA increase, we'll also be factoring in step increases. And with eight to 10 salaries to place into the formula, then you will know what's going to happen to the We've already done the cost modeling of all that, Mayor. So we know where everything everyone's going to be and kind of what that looks
like. Yes. And to catch that in that stage, because the object is to have good pay equity, have wages that attract quality candidates and retain them. And this is a way to do that to, you know, in addition to having valuable, you know, a work environment that's pleasant to work at, but you also get compensated in your work, work better. Yeah. I think it makes sense. I think one of the areas that, you know, we are seeking the direction too is in some ways,
you know, it'd make a lot of sense to say, let's do this as of January 1. Right? We're doing the budget. Let's have this all take place. One consideration with that is, you know, a, is we're calculating the cost of living, b, pay equity and dates. Right? So pay equities as of December 31, for example, of '20 right at the end of the year. I can we'll we'll get it for January 1. We'll tell them you're implementing as of January 1 for the next year. Help us? Okay. Because I'm I'm very afraid. Our current system, we got buy pay equity, in '23. I don't know that we'd keep getting by. So I I guess that would be a consideration.
Right? And we can run a costing of, okay, if we implement this in September or October, what does that cost us for the remainder of the year? Right. This 20,000 is kind of a budgetary impact of kind of a full full year on that. And so it'd be a percentage of that. And so it'd be kind of okay. Do we want to start this early? Or not early, but kind of adopt it and then have it then? Or do we wanna have this as a budgetary planned one? And so we can we can do either one, and we can talk about that more as I run budget scenarios. But Okay. I mean, I think we should bring people to an equitable pay standard as soon as possible.
So the first thing I would be in favor of kind of doing it as soon as possible and in full. I just want to be careful that we don't institutionalize pay increases that very few of our residents ever see. We wouldn't be able to sustain. Yes, that wouldn't be thinking long term and you want to be able to set up something that's sustainable and we don't have to back off from because that would be the one thing that we would not want to do possibly unless we found that it was just out of hand and you couldn't do
that and then you'd go against one of the principles of doing it, which was to, you know, not reduce any pay. And then all of a sudden, we have to do one where we're going to reduce yeah. That wouldn't be good. No. You wouldn't want to reduce anyone. But what you could do is either not give colas or freeze people on their steps. So say, you know, we're going to give people a cola this year, but, you, Jack, are staying at step four. You're not moving from step four to step five. There's nothing that says you you people have to move through the steps. So you could keep the structure in place and then just say,
alright, you're only getting you're only getting the COLA this year. So there's different ways to approach it so that it is financially feasible. Okay. Yes. Depending upon what financial situation you're needing to deal with. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Because Lord knows what's going to happen when the orange man has a couple of years under his belt. But anyway, to the rest of the economy. So yeah, I like it. Good. Yeah. Thank you. Any other questions? Any other questions? It's been great. The presentation. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you all so much for all the work. For all of your great help with this.
We really appreciate it. It's a pleasure. Thanks for making this clear and understandable. Yep. Thank you. So put that on. Mhmm. September workshop. Okay. That makes sense. All right. Next, our next order of business is approval of the minutes of our 08/06/2025, City Council workshop meeting minutes with the Planning Commission. Any changes to those minutes? We can adopt them. I thought that it was pretty clear. Got a lot of information. Yeah, I'll go for a motion to approve the minutes. So moved.
So moved by Wassenberg. Further discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor of approving the minutes of the 08/06/2025, City Council workshop meeting minutes, signify by saying aye. Aye. All those opposed, same sign. Motion carries four-zero. Public hearings, don't have any tonight. Tonight, we have one item on our consent agenda comprising about 10 pages of financial documents. So we have general disbursements through 08/22/2025,
of $68,476.69 payroll through 08/11/2025, dollars 22,156.15 wire payments through 08/22/2025, of $16,550.52 That's our consent agenda is our finances. Motion to pass the consent agenda. So moved. So moved by Lee. All those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Same sign. Motion carries four-zero.
Policy items? Don't have any of those tonight. The, we're missing announcements on here that we usually have at this point. So I should have caught that as I was at the pages. I was reading it until I got down here. What normally goes in this spot, Can I move to amend the agenda to include, replace policy items with announcements and messages? Make that motion. Oh, so we can do it that way? Yes. If we have enough of a vote, we can suspend the agenda and then amend it mid course with unanimous consent
or with a 60% vote, I believe it is, according to the signal thing. But we'll just change A to updates and announcements. Yes, we'll change H to from policy to announcements. All those in favor of making that agenda modification, signify by saying aye. All those opposed, same sign. Motion carries four-zero. We'll now go into announcements. Item H, Let's start down here, we'll go at the end of the alphabet. Wassenberg? Mike, don't actually have any announcements. Okay. There we go. It's good we made it a minute because I'm sure someone else probably will.
Okay. Lee? Yeah. So on the eighteenth, the Community Engagement Commission met and, we talked about, most of the time was around Human Rights Day and looking at that, be having a focus on food insecurity and having some type of panel discussion or presentation around that from different organizations that support our community and surrounding cities as well. So we're we're excited about seeing how that can come together. That was, again,
what we spent most of our time on, and we still have openings on the CEC. So just contact city hall or use the website to put in your application for it. The other thing that I want to share, I wanna start out with saying this, and if you forget everything else I say, remember this, love is greater than hatred. And we had our neighborhoods, be flier ed with two different sets of flyers. One set around racism, another around antisemitism, and I am opposed to it as I know the rest of us sitting here
on the council are. Whether it was a resident, most likely someone passing through, whether because of other activities going on in Falcon Heights right now or not, it's evil and it's hatred, and for me it comes from not just hatred but also bitterness and fear. And I believe that peace, and I want to use the word shalom because it's a much stronger, broader word than the word peace, and love are overpowering to such hatred, of fear.
So I'm opposed to that, and I just want our residents to feel that this is still a safe and welcoming community to everyone, all people groups. This is home. That's what Falcon Heights is known for and will continue to be known for. So I'll just pause on that for a second. And I also want to express, heartfelt condolences for Minneapolis and this Annunciation Church and School for the deaths that happened today. It did not need to happen and the children that lost their lives and those
that were injured, thank God those that were injured will survive, and just the trauma that that has caused to the community there and to, the rest of us. And, my heart goes out and when I found out in my place of work My team, we stopped and we prayed. And I appreciate that the words that have gone forth from the principal speak of, you know, we have to pray, but also put our feet to action with that.
And he spoke of their theme this year is one of hope and we can still hold on to hope. And so with that, I extend my condolences and let's hold our our babies, let's hold our family members close today. Thank you. Yes. Paula? Sir, on Melanie, thank you for your words. I stopped tonight at the, annual Meet the Teacher night at Falcon Heights Elementary School, which went on and was held. And Ms. Vankie, the principal, really expressed her appreciation that our officers were present there and also some Roseville officers
and just really valued that they, stopped and were there to meet with families and be part of that. So, yeah, so tough night. And otherwise, state fair parking, that is the big theme. And, Jack, I'll let you give the update. I've been walking our neighborhoods that are impacted by it regularly and hearing really good feedback from residents. And, yeah, overall feeling is parking is more orderly. There's less traffic coming in, and the residents been here since the seventies, and I feel like quality of life is back for us during the state fair
time. Yeah. I'll, say things have been said that are perfectly stated. So, Jeff, what's going on in the city? Yes. Thank you, mayor and council. I'd also echo, you know, council member Ali's words. Those were summed it up very well. Just kind of as we you know, here at City Hall, too, kind of reacted. And, you know, it's kind of everything that when something like that happens and you kinda all hear the news and just kind of the the mood and the day, changes quite a bit, and so we all think about that. So appreciate that. Couple of updates. So, yes, paid parking,
and kind of the state fair modification. So we continue to kind of work with residents and, kind of the the feedback we're getting. Right? And so we're always getting good feedback of kind of areas we need more signs or changing different stuff. Stuff. So we've been very trying to work on that flexible in the moment, and then also noting stuff for the future too, right, as we kinda do eventually State Fair Task Force is planning, a survey. So after the fair, we'll put out kind of our annual survey, collect data from there, and discuss kind of how else to get kind of more feedback on both the
program and then also just parking and life during the state fair in general. And so taking that information, and then also thinking, okay, you know, moving forward, how do we take some of those modifications and make improvements, right? And so we heard a bit of that. One example, you know, we heard concerns about, you know, the signs, you know, not visible, you know, kind of a a challenge. Those are the the trade off of getting the free signs is that we don't you know, the signs are what they are everywhere. You know, we can make little modifications, but, you know, it's not, you know, completely custom or different colors or other stuff like that.
So but what we've been trying to do is trying to be kind of listen and work and get, like, the a frames or add additional stake signs and looking kind of at our plans for that. We continue to kinda make those modifications during the fair. So that's been going really well, working well with kinda residents, sharing other feedback, other concerns, safety stuff, has been going very good for the fair. Other news to the community park, we had another weekly update today. Just got noticed today the of the water disconnect. So that's been the driver that they've been waiting for,
demolition. Then they're getting crews. So long story, I know kind of this date is moving back a little bit. But now it's September 8, so a week from Monday is demo week. So, first day, I think, is tree clearing, getting some of those trees down and the other site removal. And then I believe it's the ninth, is when they'll start the demo. It'll be done by the eleventh. So about two days' worth of demo is what they're expecting. Everything going up until kind of getting the the building will start getting erected in, mid October, and then kinda going up till the winter,
framing that in, getting it all done kind of right around Thanksgiving time frame, and then taking a pause for the winter, and then installing the playground and final touches in the spring. So we're still right on track. It just depends on how warm the spring is. But if it's a very normal Minnesota winter, we could say if we say that by, like, you know, a grand opening sometime in May would be likely, that we'd be able to do kind of a ribbon cutting on the full park. Some landscaping, obviously, in the spring too then. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of the final landscaping and other stuff kinda continuing in the spring.
And there'll be some items too, like the fence, for example, you know, around the playground. We did get the grant, so that one might be, you know, later as well. So kind of just timing. Removal of the playground was one thing we talked today. We're trying to push that back into the spring, and we might have two playgrounds for a while, you know, a new one, an old one. Perfect. And so framing more for that than taking it out too early and just kinda coordinating that. Sure. So a lot of coordination, kind of all all the various parties working together. That's going quite well. The, PMP, so the pavement management program. Northholme substantially completed.
They've just made it before the fair. We were really pushing the contractor to get all their final cleanup out before the fair. They were out cleaning up, like, the night before the fair and late Yep. Getting that all out. Falcon Woods, there's still remaining punch list items. So they got it finished. They haven't done the path here from prior, up to Falcon Woods. So they're gonna do the path. They have to do some kind of replacements. They have kind of different holes, other stuff. So the contractor's gonna be coming out and doing that and then also doing their reseating. We're pushing the reseating back probably about a month or so. We've learned in 2023
that they had done it kind of right before the fair. The temperatures weren't good, and then got a lot of weeds during that time. Better growth if they wait longer. So, so that one's kind of at, like, 95%, but it's sitting at 95%. And so I know some neighbors are kind of questioning that. So we just encourage them to keep following up with kind of the Roseville updates as we get the latest on that. So those are some of the big projects the city is working on. Cool. Thank you. Any other questions? All right. I'll open it up to Community Forum, an opportunity for residents to come before the council and give us three minutes of
their astute observations. While items may be brought to the council and may be referred for consideration, we may ask questions, but no council action for discussion will be held. But welcome. State your name, Chuck. All right. Good evening, Mayor, Council members, City Administrator, Chuck Long, 1717 Albert Street. I want to thank the city for its prompt responsiveness to the racist propaganda that got dumped in the Northeast quadrant over the weekend and also thank, the residents in that area for cleaning it up and getting it out of there.
Your prompt action and support is greatly appreciated. Thank you. I also want to again, commend the city for implementing the Pay to Park program. To me, this has been nothing but a win win win proposition. Certainly, as with any time, the first time you start a program, there are going to be things that you're going to want to tweak and modify and so on. But again, to me, this has been nothing but a win. And I would certainly encourage I understand that it's a one year contract with a couple of option years, and I would certainly encourage the city,
to renew that contract for next year and into the future. On that topic of parking, couldn't help but notice, however, that several of our businesses along Snelling And Larpenter have decided to expand their repertoire into the public parking business, which I don't think is probably incorporated into any of their business licenses. We don't allow private citizens to engage in parking activities during the fair. I've never understood why we allow private businesses to do it. But if we are going to do it, then I think as you go through,
and I understand from the meeting minutes that you're going through the code and looking at updating ordinances and so on, that you institute a business license or a special permit or something, to govern this. To me, it's it's only right, And I think the city ought to look into it and ought to license it and ought to regulate it. Finally, I want to touch on favorite topic, 1407 Larpenter. Certainly appreciate the steps that the city has taken, the closed meeting, to discuss the matter in more detail and to,
go into the possibility of purchasing that property. As you are well aware, you folks condemned that property more than a year ago. It continues to decay. It continues to be a target for vandalism, again, graffiti within the last couple of days. And that's exactly why as a owner, you don't ignore, abandon and, allow your property to decay. In that vein, I would like to suggest to the council that you invoke your authority under city ordinance and code and state law,
And you direct, and order the property owner to demolish that building, that you set a date for that, and that if the owner does not comply with that directive, that the city go in, demolish it for him, and then assess that cost to the property. He's the one who's responsible for his property. He has allowed it to erode into that condition. I, as a taxpayer, should not have to be responsible for the removal of that building should, in fact, a sale go through. You have the authority to do it. I would encourage you to discuss it with your attorneys and start that process.
Thank you. Thank you, Chuck, very much. Second call for, Community Forum. Third call, seeing none, we'll close Community Forum. And I want to thank everybody for coming out on a beautiful weather night and a little reprieve from the state fair activity. And I'll move to adjourn. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. All those opposed, same sign. Thank you very much. And a vote for all. We are adjourned.