The Personnel Board voted unanimously this week to approve the highest cost-of-living adjustment in many years for the town’s nonunion employees. After a short discussion, the board voted unanimously to approve a 5.4% cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) for those employees in fiscal 2023.
Since 2008, the cost-of-living increase for nonunion town employees has ranged between 0 and 2.5%, based on the September consumer price index as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For fiscal 2022 the COLA was 1.4%. But this year the September report showed a 5.4% increase for the past 12 months, with the biggest jump in the costs of food and fuel.
The increase will affect 37 town employees, primarily at Town Hall, the library, and the Council on Aging. The Police Department and the Fire Department, as well as several others, also have one or two employees in this category.
The cost-of-living adjustments for employees, such as teachers, DPW workers, and police officers, who are represented by unions, are written into their contracts. The same is true for individuals who have contracts with the town, such as the town administrator and many department heads. As those contracts were mostly negotiated when inflation was lower than it is now, the adjustments are generally well below 5.4%.
“We are in a time of crazy inflation,” said Victor Normand, who chairs the Personnel Board. But he pointed out that the board’s precedent is to use the September figure. The town has benefited from the very low CPI increase in recent years, he noted, and breaking precedent to go lower than the CPI this year could lead to pressure in the opposite direction in future years.
Until 2018, nonunion town employees received step increases based on years of service in addition to cost-of-living adjustments, which led to raises that were usually about 4.3% a year over the decade before 2018. But in 2019 those steps were eliminated for nonunion town employees (although not the nonunion school employees), to be replaced by a merit-pay pool of either 1% or 1.5%. In the past three years, raises for nonunion town employees have averaged about 2.7%.
