Pelham approves compensation plan updates, pay increase for city manager

By DONALD MOTTERN | Staff Writer

PELHAM – Some workers for the city of Pelham will see their pay increased as the result of the city’s new compensation plan, which was passed at a regularly scheduled Pelham City Council meeting on Monday, Aug. 19.

“In 2022 the council shared with us that they would like for all of our jobs to reach P50, about 50 percent market,” said Tracy Hill, Human Resources Director for the city of Pelham. “We aren’t quite there, but we are very close. Our goal has been to steadily work toward getting all of our positions at P50.”

That goal would mean that all positions in Pelham would receive pay higher than 50 percent of the same positions from other comparable employers.

In making this adjustment, Pelham contracted with Human Resource Management, Inc. to help organize and gather survey data that proved to be priceless in the construction of Pelham’s new compensation plan.

According to Hill, this collaboration—which the city has used in the past—allowed for Pelham to access a vast amount of data that otherwise would have proven hard to find or proven prohibitively expensive for the city to collect.

This made it possible for the city to accurately examine, to the best comparable level, how Pelham’s pay scales compare to surrounding locations. This applied to both common positions, such as accountants and HR executives, but also more specific positions like those in Pelham’s sewer plant that don’t have as many one-to-one comparable positions in surrounding municipalities.

“For instance, we can look at market data for a particular job just in the Southeast, just in Alabama, just in our county (and so on),” Hill said. “They are able to really cut that data and try and find good matches that pertain to Pelham.”

The city then took that market data and applied it in the creation of its new compensation plan, which worked toward the effort of ensuring that Pelham maintains an external equity with surrounding municipalities and does not lose valuable employees to nearby cities offering easily higher rates.

Hill also spoke on the city’s work to provide internal equity as well with the new plan.

One of the examples given by Hill was the city’s work to ensure that an entry level maintenance tech carried the same pay grade across multiple city departments.

“This is so we are not competing one department against another,” Hill said.

The plan as now produced was first taken to department heads for review and consideration before also being taken to the Pelham Personnel Board.

“They unanimously and quickly approved this year’s plan, and so we brought it to (the Council),” Hill said.

Pelham’s new compensation plan was then approved unanimously by the Council along with two other measures related to compensation, including one intricately linked and affected by the plan.

“The city manager’s position is not part of the classified plan, it is a contracted position,” Hill said. “(Gretchen DiFante’s) contract is negotiated with the Council and ordinarily she would renegotiate that contract along with (the Council’s) term. Because we have the extra Gov. (Kay) Ivey year, it would mean that there would be another year before she would have the chance to negotiate her contract, meaning that her pay would stay the same in that time.”

According to Hill, the city of Pelham works to maintain a guideline that all supervisors receive compensation two to three grades ahead of those that they directly manage or oversee. Therefore, it quickly became a focus to also address the compensation of the city manager’s position.

“Even though the city manager is not a part of the classified plan, it became very apparent that we really could not look at (updating) the compensation plan without also considering the city manager’s pay rate,” Hill said. “We realized that with this compensation plan, our city manager would have to write reports to those who would then make more than her.”

To combat this issue, Hill and her team also requested market data for comparable city managers in Alabama.

That data showed that DiFante was already underpaid when placed alongside comparable positions in other municipalities.

“Rather than being at P50, she was about at P38,” Hill said. “That’s not very high.”

Hill highlighted that only three city managers in the state of Alabama are actually certified city managers, with one of them being DiFante.

“She is one of those three, so really she should be on the high end of the scale rather than on the low end,” Hill said. “Rather than at P38 she should really be above P50 considering the certification.”

Given those findings, Hill endorsed a pay increase for DiFante to take effect for the remainder of her current contract to offset the imbalance and ensure DiFante was compensated more than those she supervises.

“I was very conservative in my recommendation, but I do think that without it, we would have inequity internally,” Hill said.

Pelham Mayor Gary Waters further endorsed DiFante’s increase while endorsing her performance publicly.

“I’ve never seen a body that is more concerned with equity, fairness and competitiveness like this body is,” Waters said. “What I find so right about this measure is that as Gretchen’s value to this organization increases it should be reflected in her compensation.”

The new compensation plan, now approved, will go into effect on Tuesday, Oct. 1.

“We know how important it is to retain top talent,” Pelham City Council President Maurice Mercer said. “We know that we have it. This is the opportunity to make sure that we invest back in them.”

Also included in compensation changes were the implementation of a night shift compensation stipend for those working in the Pelham Police Department.

“This requested resolution is meant to hopefully entice some of our senior officers to remain on night shift and the dispatchers alike,” Pelham Police Chief Brent Sugg said. “This is to encourage them to remain on those shifts where we have some seniority. Generally, as we get newer officers they tend to go to that shift—but this is just a little bit of an incentive to help them out for working the 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift.”

As passed, the night shift stipend will provide $100 per pay period for police officers working night shifts. It will also compensate dispatchers working the 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift with a stipend of $75 per pay period and dispatchers working the 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. shift with $50 per pay period.

There is also a 3 percent cost-of-living adjustment that is currently being discussed for inclusion in the city’s budget for the 2025 fiscal year. This increase, as proposed, is intended to offset those with positions that have already reached P50 and would otherwise not receive a raise as part of the updated compensation plan.

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