Flaggs: City worker pay hike hinges on finances
Published 11:13 am Wednesday, April 23, 2014
Vicksburg city employees will know before July 1 whether they’ll be getting a pay raise, Mayor George Flaggs Jr. said.
“We’ll know where we’re sitting (financially) by then, because we’ll be in the last quarter (of the fiscal year) and then we’ll announce if we’re going to raise salaries,” Flaggs said.
His comments came after the board’s Monday morning meeting in which he clarified his plans to raise employee pay after having first told department heads April 1 that pay raises were possible next year.
Flaggs said the new raises, if approved, will become effective Oct. 1, which is the start of the city’s 2015 fiscal year. He said they will be announced before the Board of Mayor and Aldermen receive the final installment of a 5 percent pay raise set by city ordinance in 2002.
The raise, which becomes effective July 1, will boost Flaggs salary from $89,000 to $93,450, and the aldermen’s pay from $71,000 to $74,550.
He discussed the possibility of raises at an April 1 city department heads meeting. He said at the time that the raises would depend on the city’s financial condition, adding that any raises would go into effect Oct. 1.
Referring to the department head meeting, Flaggs told the board Monday, “I thought it’s time for us to give the city employees a pay raise. I still believe that. I believe that we ought to start at the bottom. Start giving the lowest person a raise by raising the minimum raise from 7.25 to $8, then we ought to go to public safety, the police department and the fire department.”
To qualify for the minimum wage increase, he said, employees must have worked at least six months with the city to get the increase by Oct. 1. A new employee who comes to work for the city in June, he said, would not see the increase until January.
Flaggs said he will ask Police Chief Walter Armstrong and Fire Chief Charles Atkins for their recommendations concerning pay increases in both departments. The mayor wants to increase public safety pay to retain experienced firefighters and officers.
“I’m going to ask them to give me the recommendation,” he said. “To me, it just makes sense for the chief police and the chief of the fire department to recommend to us what they think their officers ought to be making, and if we’re going to retain these officers, we ought to at least start at that.
“That’s not to say we’re going to be able to give it, but we ought to at least let them make the recommendation.”
After raising the minimum wage, and improving the pay scale for police officers and firefighters, Flaggs said, “then we can go to an across the board raise to all other employees, with some fine tuning because there’s some hefty salaries in this city, including mine.”
“I’m not about to raise my salary before I raise the man making $7.25 working in the cemetery cutting grass,” he said.