Six Years of Digging a Hole – Step 2

Data sources are described in the section Data Sources and Downloads.

The County accepted key recommendations of the "Slavin Study" in 2000, during the middle of its rapid build up of staff. This Study compared our County's pay scale with other California counties and determined that the County paid less than the average in those other Counties. Slavin recommended that the County increase its payroll between 5.5% to 7.7% (Slavin Study). That would have caused salaries to increase from $2.4 to $3.4 million beginning with the 00 - 01 fiscal year, depending on which of 3 options the County selected. Instead, over the next two years, Total Salaries increased nearly $12 million. (County Budgets and Financial Reports)

Average Planned Salary, Benefits, and Other Staff Expense
per County of Mendocino Employee

( NOTE: We were originally told by County budget officials that the County developed its Proposed Budget assuming a "status quo" staff level – no change. However, turns out that an additional 27 positions were added. Our original calculation was that average salary and benefits were planned to be over $70,000, but the number is really $68,608.)

The data in this table is derived by dividing the "Total Salaries and Employee Benefits" shown in previous budgets in "Schedule 6D – Budget Summary by Line Item" by the number of "Allocated" or" Funded Positions" shown in most previous Final County Budgets. This produces what the County plans to pay its staff on average. As is typical of all such data, we assume a smaller number of staff make more than this average, while a larger number makes less. To the best of our knowledge the County doesn't report how many people were actually employeed in any year in its staff, so this calculation seems to us the best measure of the County's average salary and benefits. It is certainly what the County intends to do.

The years from 2000 through 2004 were very difficult economically. There is no doubt that our County's private sector workers were not enjoying anywhere near the nearly 10% annual increase in average salary and benefits as were County staff. Frankly, as business people who see everyday how our businesses and employees suffer through such a period, we feel there is something deeply unfair about such rapid increases in County staff compensation while most of the community is struggling simply to maintain it's income.

Click to go to next page, Rapid Growth of Total County Employee Salary and Benefits.