Secret Raises Anger Masses

Many Guilford County employees who haven't gotten raises in four years were outraged to learn that 15 county department heads just received large raises in secret – pay increases of up to $14,000 a year – while county administration has simultaneously been telling county employees there's no money for merit raises for them because the county budget has been cut to the bone in recent years.

Also, since the directors' raises were made public by The Rhinoceros Times last week, some commissioners who first learned of the pay increases in a closed backroom meeting are now publicly criticizing the move and the process by which the raises came about. Until the raises became public knowledge last week, many commissioners were reluctant to speak out or discuss them in any way because county staff presented those raises to the board as a "personnel issue" and a "legal matter."

The commissioners, who were told by county staff that "salary adjustments" were a legal necessity to keep Guilford County from opening itself up to a lawsuit, never took a public vote on the raises or discussed them in the open in any way.

According to county staff, while the commissioners never officially voted on the matter, there was "a consensus" in the backroom among commissioners that county management should be allowed to move forward.

One commissioner who was in the closed session said: "I don't know who's driving this, but it's not right."

Some commissioners say they don't think a clear consensus was ever reached in that closed session.

"I didn't vote for it," Commissioner Paul Gibson said.

When told that county staff claimed a consensus of commissioners was reached, Gibson said that, from the conversation – with some commissioners for and some against – it was difficult to tell where the majority of the board stood.

"I'd like to know what that vote was," Gibson said.

Some commissioners were clearly willing to go along with the move after being told that the county faced legal action if they didn't. The line of argument from the county staff is that these types of pay adjustment must be made or county employees who are not getting paid equally for equal pay would have a legitimate lawsuit that those employees could bring against the county.

Chairman of the Board of Commissioners Skip Alston, for instance, said this week that the county had to grant the raises since a lawsuit might have cost the county much more than the salary adjustments. Alston said that, if a lawsuit were successful, the county could be forced to pay years of back wages to an employee who won in court.

Gibson asked – if it's such a great idea to give the raises to the department heads, and there's a legal necessity behind the move as well as support among the commissioners – why was there no public discussion or any official vote in an open meeting?

Gibson said that, if The Rhinoceros Times hadn't found out about the raises, no one would have ever known about them – or, at least, the pay increases would have only been discovered at some point in the future, and then, he said, the excuse given at that time would be that that decision was made by a former board and a former manager who was now retired.

One county official said there are other problems with the raises as well – such as where the county is supposed to find the money in a budget that county officials claimed in June contained absolutely no fat.

The presentation of county management's decision to grant the raises was made by Assistant County Manager Sharisse Fuller, who's also Guilford County's human resources director. County Manager Brenda Jones Fox and Guilford County Attorney Mark Payne were in the closed session as well.

Commissioner Mike Winstead is one of the most reserved members of the Board of Commissioners; however, Winstead was very outspoken this week on this latest move to grant department heads raises.

"It's ludicrous," Winstead said of the raises and the way they came about.

Winstead said that, in the closed session, staff presented the raises as a virtual necessity because of fear of a lawsuit.

Fuller told The Rhinoceros Times this week that the raises were "equity salary adjustments." She said the Guilford County Human Resources Department determined what the salaries of the Guilford County department heads should be in order to create equity. She added that the Human Resources Department has been looking at many county employees to compare the pay for those in similar positions with similar experience and a similar educational background.

In an email to The Rhinoceros Times, Fuller wrote that the raises for department heads were "equity adjustments pertaining to the Department Directors pursuant to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the Equal Pay Act, and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act." Fuller contends that that legislation, which requires fair and equitable pay for employees in similar situations, is what leaves the county open to a lawsuit if the salary adjustments had not been made.

Winstead said he finds that argument baseless. He said it seems ridiculous on its face because each county department only has one department head; and, if these raises really are, as staff claims, the result of strictly internal comparisons looking only at other county employee pay, then it doesn't make any sense to give equity pay increases to department directors.

"These are department heads," Winstead said. "There's no one else to compare them to and judge those salaries‑ against."

He said he could find no rhyme or reason for the amounts.

"This is the only place where you can slap 12 people's names on a list and say we have to give them raises or we'll get sued," Winstead said.

There were 15 names of department heads who got raises on the list provided to The Rhinoceros Times by the county. It's not clear exactly what was on the information sheet presented to the commissioners in the closed session because, at the end of that presentation, county staff collected those sheets from the commissioners. County staff did so even though salaries and raises – and even "equity salary adjustments" – are public record.

The Rhinoceros Times obtained the list of the 15 directors and their salary increases through a public records request made on Friday, Nov. 16 and a second request on the following Monday. The Rhino Times received the information on Tuesday, Nov. 20 – even though the information was already compiled into presentation form since the commissioners were given the same information in the closed session weeks earlier.

The directors who got raises were Guilford County Finance Director Reid Baker, who's salary went from $128,600 to $135,000; Sheriff BJ Barnes, from $137,493 to $142,000; Tax Director Ben Chavis, from $105,600 to $113,000; Security Director Jeff Fowler, from $80,133 to $87,000; Elections Director George Gilbert, from $97,372 to $99,319; Budget Director Mike Halford, from $112,013 to $120,000; Facilities Director Fred Jones, from $99,961 to $109,000; Child Support/Court Services Director Renee Kenan, from $102,950 to $110,000; Juvenile Detention Director Doug Logan, from $78,917 to $86,500; County Attorney Mark Payne, from $148,600 to $153,000; Emergency Services Director Alan Perdue, from $107,532 to $115,000; Internal Audit Director Martha Rogers, from $101,154 to $110,000; Register of Deeds Jeff Thigpen, from $107,438 to $109,586; Clerk to the Board Effie Varitimidis, from $77,850 to $81,500; and Social Services Director Robert Williams, who's salary went from $125,778 to $140,000 a year.

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Winstead said he also had questions about the peculiar timing of the raises, which were presented to the commissioners at one of the final meetings of the outgoing board.

"Why now?" Winstead asked. "Shouldn't this be a matter for the new board? Are the department heads really going to sue us in the next three weeks?"

According to Winstead, the whole event is very similar to an 11th-hour payout of $200,000 that the outgoing Board of Commissioners gave to the High Point Area Arts Council at the commissioners' last regular meeting on Thursday, Nov. 15.

Winstead said that move made it evident to him that the board wasn't acting rationally – but instead was simply handing out money to any one who could find six votes of support at the last meeting of the outgoing board.

The decision to give the money to the High Point Area Arts Council, to help the group purchase a new headquarters, wasn't on the Nov. 15 agenda, wasn't vetted or discussed beforehand publicly in any way, and the new funding for the arts council came out of the blue at a time when the county is telling drug addicts, who had been getting treatment through the county's substance abuse clinic – basically a place of last resort – that they would no longer be able to receive treatment from the county because the funding just isn't there.

The original request for the money for the High Point arts council that night came at the beginning of the meeting from a well-dressed speaker from the floor: High Point attorney Jim Morgan, who serves on the board of the High Point Area Arts Council.

Winstead told of his reaction when he heard that request.

"Jim Morgan came in a tuxedo and asked for the money, and I leaned over to another commissioner, and I said, 'Yeah that's really going to happen.'"

Winstead, who was making that remark sarcastically since he thought at that point there was no way the board would grant such an out of the ordinary request, said that, later in the meeting, when the motion to grant the money passed, he was dumbfounded.

"That shows how out of the loop I am," Winstead said.

Winstead said the raises for the department heads were just one more example of that type of mindless government.

"That was worse than the arts," Winstead said of the raises.

Winstead, an outgoing commissioner, suggested that, since the commissioners are now just haphazardly handing out money that's nowhere in the budget, perhaps there should be bonuses for the commissioners who are leaving the board.

"We should vote to give the outgoing commissioners $25,000 as appreciation for their service to the county," Winstead said sarcastically. "Why not? I think we could get six votes for it."

He went on to theorize about which commissioners he could get to go along with the $25,000 bonuses for commissioners.

When Gibson was asked about the argument that the raises had to be granted or the county would open itself up to a lawsuit, Gibson had a two-word reply: The first word of his response, "bull," is repeatable in The Rhinoceros Times; however, the second word is not.

He said the move was absurd.

"I really don't understand how they did that," Gibson said.

He said it may make sense at some point to adjust salaries for department heads that are truly out of line, "But not right now," Gibson added, citing the economy and all the things the county has had to cut in recent years.

Gibson also asked, if it was the right thing to do, why was everything done behind closed doors?

"None of these department heads are going to sue us," Gibson said. "Is Mark Payne really going to sue us because he doesn't get a $5,000 raise?"

Fuller said the county has been looking to establish and maintain pay equity among employees for years.

Fuller said the law requiring equity in pay applies to all companies with 15 employees or more. She said the county has been studying, and is continuing to look into, equity issues among all county employees. Fuller also said reviewing equity pay is now standard practice when people are hired so that the county doesn't make itself a target for a lawsuit.

"We look at everybody when they are hired," Fuller said.

Payne said that salary adjustments of this kind fall under the authority of the manager, and he said that if there hadn't been a consensus, the board could have prevented the manager from moving forward with the raises.

County employees, who have been denied merit raises for four years in a row now, were buzzing when they heard of the large raises for the department heads.

One angry employee who wrote to The Rhinoceros Times stated after reading the article: "I was hired at the bottom of the pay grade. I thought, naively, that once I demonstrated my ability and work ethic, my compensation would be adjusted accordingly. However, after four years of seeing just how dysfunctional and inefficient our County government and administration really are, I know that the only way for me to ever succeed is to wait for the economy to improve and leave Guilford County as soon as possible."

The employee said he believes the rampant anger and dissatisfaction among many of the county's 2,300 employees over their mistreatment for years on end will be obvious once the economy recovers.

"I predict," he wrote, "that there will be a massive walk out when the economy eventually improves because those of us who've been hired in the last five years from the private sector are mad as hell and cannot wait to go back to a real world meritocracy where we can have reasonable expectations of succeeding based solely on our own talent and efforts."

He also said the irony of the raises going to top-level employees is that, in many cases throughout all Guilford County departments, it's the lower-echelon county employees who are doing the majority of the real work, finding efficiencies, and making any of innovative and beneficial changes in the way Guilford County government is run.

"That's not to say that there aren't many long term County employees who are conscientious, knowledgeable and hard-working," he wrote, "but for every one of them there is at least one more who never had the skills nor the inclination to do anything except play the system and collect a paycheck … It's a real shame. The environment here does not reward, and in fact, does not even encourage, competency or hard work or innovation."

Winstead said he could sum the situation up easily: He said it would be insane if he ran his construction company in this manner.

"Only government could work this way," Winstead said.