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The Freeborn County Board of Commissioners voted 3-2 Tuesday to approve a revised wage table for county employees as a means to attract and retain more employees with the county in a competitive job market. 

Freeborn County Administrator Tom Jensen said the adjustment will effectively increase starting wages for new employees, as well as employees who have been at the top step of their job without any opportunity for increases. 

“As everybody’s well aware of, the retention and attraction of employees is a very difficult thing,” Jensen said. 

This year the adjustment will affect 97 people and will cost the county about $100,000. The new starting step will be about 80 cents higher than where it was previously, he said.

Personnel Director Candace Pesch said the change would affect 17 people next year, 28 people the following year, 33 people the year after that, 36 people the fourth year, 23 people the fifth year and 22 people the sixth year. 

“It’s a targeted adjustment, but it makes our scale in line with the market,” she said. Only those who haven’t received a step increase for a year or more would receive a pay increase. 

She said the county fell behind in its wages because of cost of living increases that were too low compared to the market. 

“This will correct that and keep us in line, especially in this competitive, competitive market that we have right now for gaining employees,” she said. 

First District Commissioner Brad Edwin said he was opposed to the scale adjustment and motioned to postpone any action until the Jan. 3 meeting in the event any new commissioners were elected, as all will be up for election this fall. 

Second District Commissioner Dan Belshan seconded the motion, but after a roll call vote, the motion failed 2-3 with Edwin and Belshan the only commissioners voting to support the motion.

Edwin said cost of living adjustments are meant to keep up with inflationary costs, not doing adjustments to the whole scale like this. He questioned that people who would go from a step 1 to a step 2 would essentially be receiving a 5% increase, in addition to the 3% cost of living adjustment approved at the beginning of the year, for a total of an 8% increase.

He said the commissioners have talked about being competitive with other counties but he has not seen numbers to show differences. He also said he thinks the county should be looking at its starting wages and not its top-tier wages and said the commissioners need to be mindful of who they represent.

Commissioner Ted Herman said while he understands Edwin’s thought process, he thinks sometimes the commissioners have to make tough decisions.

“And this is one of them,” Herman said. 

Pesch said the county has recently had to jump steps to get new assistant county attorneys and patrol deputies. 

Commissioner John Forman noted the county is also trying to avoid what has happened in the past where it had to spend a lot of money all at once to catch up on wages. 

“I feel that if we’re going to get the point where we’re losing people, we’ve waited too long,” he said. “We’ve had a retention problem, we do not have a retention problem right now. Why would we want to go back to having a retention problem?”

Belshan questioned why the adjustment wasn’t being done at the same time as regular budget discussions and said he was opposed to “mid-year bumps.”

The revised wage table goes into effect May 29.