1981-09-16 Joint Public Hearing and Regular Meeting

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i • Minutes, Joint Public Hearing and Regular Meeting September 16, 1981, Page 7 that our input was not necessary, and has since come up with this. This is wrong and unjust. Longley: Mr. Jacobs, do you have any recommendations to submit? Jacobs: Well, we got caught with our britches down. We just saw this this afternoon. We have been in the dark the whole time the Civil Service campaign has been going on. I mean the Council has been working on the Civil Service. We have had no input. We feel it needs to be sat down and worked out, and no, it does not have to go into effect by October 1. The statutes say within 30 days after the fiscal year, so we've. got a month and a half that we would like to set down with the Council and try to draw up some working system that would be fair. Longley: Jim, is Mr. Jacobs interpreting the pay raise cor- rectly? Hudgens: Not entirely. The difference between the top pay range and the classification beginning pay range is something • we have had in our classification system since its beginning. It is something that exists; as a matter of fact everyone, Pasadena, Baytown, everyone who has the step system has the same problem. The problem comes with the compression of the salary structure from the bottom to the top there is a very small area of disparity. These salaries that are listed are competitive with other police salaries.. The policy that we have followed in the past is, for example, a patrolman is at $20,290 wanted to be promoted to sergeant. He will not take a pay cut. He will be moved into the over 12 months step at $20,889. So he would not get a decrease in his salary. There is every possibility that the man at $19,318.00 also passes the exam so he also would start at step A. That's something that's been done since our City began and it's not going to go away. The only way to correct that is to increase the disparity and in doing that you increase salaries to the point that -- unless you want to reduce them to widen the disparity, you push the salaries up to where they are higher than what they should be and still remain effective. Longley: But is it true that detectives will take a pay cut? Hudgens: The people that are currently serving in those posi- tions, the Civil Service Statutes provides that those will be sergeants slots, under Civil Service. A person will be tempo- rarily a sergeant until the test. T take that back. I ----- • Jacobs: Until the test they will be temporary sergeants, until the test. If a patrolman took the test and passed it -----