City Approves Target Areas For Ongoing Pay Study

OCEAN CITY – With city officials preparing for upcoming union negotiations, the Mayor and City Council received an update on an ongoing classification and pay study for Ocean City employees.

On Tuesday afternoon, Human Resources Director Wayne Evans introduced David Lookingbill of Management Advisory Group (MAG), who presented an update of the town’s current classification and pay study.

In June, the council authorized MAG to perform a citywide compensation and benefits study. Since then employee data has been collected, and MAG is ready to determine target areas for the compensation survey.

“The process that we go through is a condemnation process where we get information from the employees and their supervisors about what actually is going on right now in the various jobs of the town and that process is winding down,” Lookingbill said. “The other part of the process is to get salary survey information from a variety of organizations and for a variety of different types of level of work in your organization, so we can bring those two together.”

MAG President Donald Long submitted the firm has been working closely with town staff on this project, and in August MAG and Ocean City’s Human Resources Department worked together to complete employee orientation sessions that were well attended.

So far, 584 employees have started their online Job Analysis Questionnaires (JAQ) while 476 employees have completely finished. Of these, 227 questionnaires have been reviewed by supervisors.

Long furthered, MAG has identified benchmark positions that would be included in the salary survey portion of the project that represent various departments within the town structure and levels within the compensation structure. MAG is estimating approximately 40 benchmark positions would be used in the market survey.

MAG recommended a list of “survey targets” that are agencies and employers that MAG will target to compare compensation data. The survey targets are similar to Ocean City in size and structure, geographically within the region, and those that may be competitors in the market.

“Your organization here presents a little bit more of a challenge because you swing from a relatively small town during part of the year to a rather large populated urban area during part of the year, and so there is delicate balance that you all must find to how you structure your organization and how you staff your departments to be able to reasonably meet the needs that are so wildly different from one time of the year to the other,” Lookingbill said.

MAG also recommended targets for executive level positions that will be slightly different than for general employees because the recruiting requirements for executive positions will differ.

The recommended target agencies for general employee positions include Annapolis, Baltimore, Bowie, Easton, Berlin, Gaithersburg, Rockville, Salisbury, Anne Arundel County, Wicomico County, Worcester County, Salisbury University and the State of Maryland as well as Dover, Kent County, Sussex County and Wilmington in Delaware.

In addition to those organizations,  MAG recommended adding Maryland State Police for police rank structure positions; Frederick County for fire rank structure positions; Bethany Beach, Rehoboth Beach and Virginia Beach for lifeguard positions; and Myrtle Beach, Raleigh, Richmond and Wilmington for executive level positions.

“We try to get a fairly broad selection of targets because in the many years I have been doing this I can tell you … the responding to salary surveys is not something that ends up at the top of the to do list. So, if we ask for information from 25-30 organizations we would be pretty happy to get information back from half of those,” Lookingbill said.

Councilman Dennis Dare appreciated that the list included Salisbury University but asked for additional institutions to be considered, such as the University of Maryland, because it has bus drivers on staff.

“It would be nice to have a little more of a quasi-public institution to be able to get in here but I think it is a good list of targets. Some of them are much bigger while some of them are much smaller but that all starts to average out as we start to put it together,” he said.

Dare made a motion to adopt MAG’s recommended list of survey targets. The council voted 5-1 with Councilman Brent Ashley opposed, and Councilwoman Margaret Pillas abstained.

Pillas abstained because she will not be serving on the council by the time the survey results are released as her four-year term comes to an end in November and she is not seeking re-election.

Ashley has been in opposition to the study since the concept was first introduced to the council.

In March, a debate over the study ensued among the council. Pillas asked why the study could not be completed in-house by city staff to save the already allocated funding, such as when Evans conducted a compensation and benefits survey in 2011.

Evans responded at that time he conducted a market study only to compare Ocean City to other comparable jurisdictions based on some benchmark positions. The survey did not expand into position classifications and employee responsibilities.

At that time, City Manager David Recor reminded the council the funding for the study had already been allocated in the current fiscal year’s budget and is an initiative that will carry on into the next fiscal year fully funded.

Following the council’s decision to move forward with the classification and pay study, the council approved MAG to conduct the survey based on their matrix scores, focus on municipal government classification and compensation work as its core business, inclusion of software tools as part of the project cost, free follow-up consultation for one year after implementation, favorable references, and a low bid of $45,960.