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POSTED: Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2008

Whatcom County Council quietly raises salaries for managers, department heads

Whatcom County Council members gave raises to supervisors, department managers and various elected officials Tuesday night, Oct. 21, with no discussion, though two officials did raise concerns earlier.

The increases in 2009 range from 2.75 percent for support and professional supervisors and 2.88 percent across-the-board increases for management and department heads, to about 6.6 percent for elected officials like the county executive, treasurer, assessor and sheriff.

Some of those positions get a first-quarter review annually to ensure they're earning wages similar to elected officials in other jurisdictions.

It appears that only the elected officials are receiving a raise that has outpaced last year's inflation, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistic's Consumer Price Index. The closest information is for the Seattle area, where the cost of goods overall increased by about 5.4 percent between September 2007 and September 2008.

The raises are comparable to those provided in various agreements recently settled between the county and unions that represent many bargaining units that work for the government.

The increases come at a time of severe economic downturn nationally and locally, and when County Executive Pete Kremen has proposed major changes to the 2009-10 biennium budget. That includes eliminating at least 30 vacant positions, killing the cultural arts program at the Roeder Home and other changes to save money.

Asked if those economic issues were discussed, county officials said it didn't make sense to not approve the raises.

"I think the thinking is, you don't support the budget on the backs of a few," said Wendy Wefer-Clinton, the county's Human Resources Department employee relations manager. "To hold the unrepresenteds up, (to say) 'You don't get any increase just because your timing is off,' that doesn't really seem fair."

Council members agreed.

Council Chairman Carl Weimer said that the unions received raises and the unrepresented employees need someone to go to bat for them, too.

Councilwoman Barbara Brenner, in a brief Finance Committee discussion, called for a wage freeze for those unrepresented employees as well as County Council members until the economy rights itself. She received no support for her motions.

Councilwoman Laurie Caskey-Schreiber proposed an across-the-board 2.75 percent increase due to the economy, though the committee didn't consider her motion, either. Instead, the proposals were supposed to be discussed at the night meeting.

When it came time to vote on the raises, which had been placed within the council's consent agenda - used to consider routine or non-controversial items in one bloc - neither Brenner nor Caskey-Schreiber spoke up.

The meeting was packed with other major issues like rules for wind towers, paramedic funding and the county land transfer with the state Department of Natural Resources. And because of that, Caskey-Schreiber said, she simply forgot to mention the salary issue.

"I think we were just so fried," she said.

Most of the council's discussion on the salary increases took place in a closed-to-the-public executive session. But county attorneys and the Attorney General's Office appear to disagree on whether or not that is allowed.

State law provides that collective bargaining - when unions and a government negotiate the overall wages and benefits - is allowed to take place in an executive session.

But the unrepresented employees are not a bargaining unit.

The Washington state Open Public Meetings Act states that "discussion by a governing body of salaries, wages, and other conditions of employment to be generally applied within the agency shall occur in a meeting open to the public."

Dan Gibson, assistant chief civil deputy prosecuting attorney, said he doesn't advise the County Council - that's the job of county attorney Karen Frakes - but he did offer up his view on the law to Frakes when asked.

He said that the collective bargaining section of state law says that overall strategy can be discussed in a closed meeting, and that there is no way to discuss the unrepresented employees without a discussion of how that impacts the strategy for dealing with collective bargaining units.

"There's this almost inextricable link between the strategy for the collective bargaining process and the initial discussion (on the unrepresented employees)," Gibson said.

That's not the way that Tim Ford reads that section of law. Ford is the special assistant attorney general for government accountability in the Washington State Attorney General's Office.

"I don't know how you would make the argument that those unrepresented individuals are part of a collective bargaining strategy," Ford said. "I think you have to segregate the discussions."

Ford said the law seems to very explicitly say that general salary discussions must take place in the open for the public to hear.

"Because you have this explicit requirement," Ford said, "you just have to do it that way."