Harvard employs 38 people described as nonunion, nonstipend, noncontract workers. They staff Town Hall, the public library, and the Council on Aging. The police and fire departments, the Department of Public Works, the Board of Health, and HCTV each have one or two employees in this category. And for all of them, the town’s tight fiscal 2020 budget poses an uncertain future.
For many years, employees in this category were paid according to a “step-and-grade” system, with raises tied to years of service and to additional training and certification. Under a new “merit pay” system approved last spring by the Personnel Board and passed at the 2018 Annual Town Meeting, their raises are now supposed to be tied to yearly performance goals.
For fiscal 2020, those employees are slated to get a 2.2 percent cost-of-living pay increase, based on the rate of inflation in the consumer price index. With other town expenses rising as well, the Finance Committee’s request that departments limit budget growth to 2.5 percent left almost no room to give any of these employees a raise that goes beyond simply keeping up with inflation.
When department heads asked how to pay for merit raises, the Personnel Board took up the issue at its Jan. 31 meeting and offered a plan. Each department would get a pot of money equal to a given percentage of the salaries for the nonunion, noncontract, nonstipend workers in that department. The department head could then use that pot to provide merit raises, with the amount of each raise based on the employee’s performance rating.
Initially the board considered limiting the amount in the merit pot to 1 percent of the department’s total payroll for employees in this category. The board members calculated that a worker making $20 per hour could thus get a raise of 20 cents an hour, or $8 for a 40-hour week. But they agreed that did not seem like much of an incentive to improve performance—which is what merit pay is supposed to reward.
After briefly considering a 2 percent limit, the board voted to support a ceiling of 1.5 percent in possible merit raises. By the time the Select Board met Tuesday, the total amount available for merit raises for the 38 employees in this category had been calculated at $23,456.
Several Personnel Board members worried that raises would not truly be based on performance. Chair Victor Normand said department heads were likely to divide the pot to give everyone the same 1.5 percent raise to avoid conflicts among staff, and he suggested doing a statistical analysis next year to see if the managers had in fact done so. The idea won support from Finance Committee Chair Don Ludwig.
While the Personnel Board voted unanimously in favor of the 1.5 percent merit raise proposal, the $23,456 to fund it must still win approval from the Select Board and FinCom. The amount must also be approved by voters at Town Meeting in May. Town Administrator Tim Bragan said whether to have merit raises would be determined afresh every year
