The Oktibbeha County supervisors will receive a proposal for changes to its employee pay plan from the Stennis Institute of Government and Community Development, a service and research organization at Mississippi State University that works with local governments to make them more efficient.
The county first authorized a study of its pay plan and benefits in 2015, and District 4 Supervisor Bricklee Miller recently asked the Stennis Institute to do another study to make sure the county remains competitive in the job market. The institute interviews all the county’s employees and keeps track of its salary rates compared to similar entities, research assistant Claudette Jones said.
“The positions that are making substantially below the mean will be the positions where we’re having turnover, and a lot of times those are positions that might not be real glamorous, but they’re very important jobs,” Jones said, citing garbage collection as an example.
The city of Starkville authorized a study of its own pay plan from the Stennis Institute last year and approved a tax millage hike in September that partly served to create pay raises for some city employees, including utility linemen, police and firefighters.
The Stennis Institute considers an area’s population, tax base and millage rate, among other things, in its studies, Jones said. She commended the board for being mindful of its competitiveness in the job market and for taking employee benefits into account as well.
“You’ve got health insurance, you’ve got life insurance, you’ve got a number of things that are unbelievably valuable to you that you don’t really realize until a coworker dies and their family benefits from that life insurance, or if someone gets hurt and they have a short-term disability and are covered,” Jones said.
Supervisors voted unanimously for Jones to draft a proposal, which she said she can finish this week.
Later, the board reaffirmed a past unanimous decision for Austin Barbour, a partner with the local Clearwater Consultants firm, to seek state funding for the potential replacement of the Oktibbeha County Lake Dam. The vote had to be unanimous in order for Barbour to follow through, he said.
“(The Legislature) gets a lot of requests from every municipality and every county in the state, so to have to cut through all these requests, it’s certainly going to go to places where they know that good things are happening — places that really need help, but also that the elected officials making the requests are also (in agreement),” Barbour said.
The board also unanimously approved a study of the dam via lidar (“light radar”), which will use lasers to create a topographic map of the entire dam. The supervisors have been debating since January whether to replace the dam or just repair parts of it after County Engineer Clyde Pritchard determined it was in danger of breaching and flooding the nearby residential area.
Lidar is one of the studies the county would have to conduct on the dam in order to be considered for a portion of Mississippi’s allocation of funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Rehabilitation of High Hazard Potential Dam program.
The county might get a 65-percent reimbursement for the study, and District 1 Supervisor and Board President John Montgomery said the board should immediately ask the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality to help secure the reimbursement.
Tess Vrbin was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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