Jasper County reworks pay plans to retain and attract more workers

Supervisors have reworked all pay plans for Jasper County employees in hopes to simplify the system, attract more workers and save tax dollars in the long run.

Dennis Simon, director of human resources for Jasper County, said the new pay plans had been formulating over the past several months. Supervisors had been meeting with Simon and other department heads during work sessions to hash out the details. They looked at everything from step programs to merit systems.

“Came down to making the recommendation to move forward with the five-step pay plan,” Simon said at the Aug. 12 meeting. “It achieves everything I believe the board wanted. It increases our hiring rate, it also gets the employee to the top rate of scale; both would be very effective for recruitment tools and retainment.”

The supervisors approved five different consolidated pay plans, including plans for the sheriff’s office, courthouse/maintenance/elderly nutrition, secondary roads, conservation, hourly non-bargaining and non-department heads. In addition, the board also increased the base rate of pay for AFSCME and PPME.

All of the pay plans go into effect Aug. 23 and they will sunset on June 30, 2026.

Supervisor Thad Nearmyer, who served on the wage committee, thanked everyone involved in creating the new plans. As the newest supervisor on the board, the process served as an insightful learning experience. It seemed like it would be an easy task at first, but he soon found out how complicated it could be.

“It was a long and sometimes painful process,” Nearmyer said. “And it didn’t totally work out the way we thought it was going to work out, but it did work out.”

Supervisor Brandon Talsma said the pay plan was not accomplishing everything he was hoping for, but he was relatively satisfied with the result. The new starting pay, for instance, makes Jasper County more competitive with similar counties. The plans also speed up the process for employees to climb their pay scales.

“To where they’re not having to take 10 years or eight years to get to the top of the scale,” Talsma said. “The raises also between the steps are considerably higher. So essentially we kind of took our eight-step down and consolidated steps into this new five-step plan.”

Back in March, the board of supervisors created a wage committee to analyze employee pay plans. Initially, the board had wanted to move towards a more merit-based system. The wage committee spent the next several months trying to form a system that worked best for Jasper County.

Newton News previously reported that supervisors wanted to make the pay plan simpler. Talsma argued back then that many of the pay scale ranges weren’t being used. He also disliked the idea of a county employee having to work eight years before maxing out their step increases.

In a follow-up with Newton News, Talsma confirmed the change will save taxpayer dollars in the long term. Talsma said the previous pay plans — with their cost-of-living adjustments compounding annually with eight years of step increases — were starting to cost the county a lot of money.

Talsma said the new plan will hold costs down long term because once an employee hits the end of their steps they will only receive whatever may be given for cost-of-living adjustments. He estimated that after about seven years it should start saving the county money depending on cost-of-living adjustments.