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Retroactive pay adds up to $16,000 check for Tablack
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George Tablack
‘We’re just bringing him up to where he should have been,’ a commissioner says of the administrator’s salary.
YOUNGSTOWN — Mahoning County Administrator George J. Tablack will get a check from the county auditor’s office for $16,027 Friday.
The check will represent retroactive 3 percent annual cost-of-living pay increases going back to Jan. 1, 2006. The auditor’s office is the county’s payroll department.
The county commissioners unanimously authorized the raises in a resolution at their public meeting Nov. 20.
Tablack, who is a certified public accountant, left the county’s employ on Aug. 1, 2005, at an annual salary of $79,746 after nearly 19 years as county auditor.
After a brief stint in a $120,000-a-year job as chief financial officer of Palm Beach County, Fla., Tablack returned Dec. 5, 2005, as director of Mahoning County’s office of management and budget at an annual salary of $65,000, county personnel records show.
Effective May 15, 2006, the county commissioners gave him the additional title of county administrator and raised his salary to $95,000 a year to be both county administrator and OMB director. Tablack still retains both titles.
The 3-percent annual raises for Tablack are comparable to those contained in most recently negotiated labor union contracts for the county’s workers, said Susan E. Quimby, county human resources director, and county Commissioner David N. Ludt.
Ludt said Wednesday that he believes the pay increases for Tablack retroactive to the beginning of 2006 are justified.
“Everybody else got theirs back then,” he said of other county employees who received raises effective that date. “Everybody else got their 3 percent. We’re just bringing him up to where he should have been,” Ludt said.
Ludt cited a study of key county employee positions by Archer Co. personnel consultants of Westerville, for which the county paid $32,500, showing that $98,380 a year was the low end of Archer’s suggested pay range for the county administrator post alone based on comparisons to the same job in other Ohio counties.
By giving Tablack his raise, the commissioners are putting him at $113,137 a year — the midpoint of Archer’s recommended range. The high end was $132,813. Results of the Archer study were released in October 2007.
The county’s last previous OMB director, Elizabeth Sublette, earned $62,000 a year for the OMB job alone when she resigned after two years to return to the private sector in March 2004, Ludt noted. That post remained vacant until Tablack assumed it in December 2005.
Former County Administrator Gary Kubic earned $85,000 a year when he left the county’s payroll five years ago to become administrator of Beaufort County, S.C., Ludt added. The administrator post was vacant between Kubic’s December 2003 departure and Tablack’s appointment to it in May 2006.
Because the county could not previously afford to give Tablack a raise and because the commissioners wanted to avoid making Tablack’s raise a political issue, Ludt said the commissioners deferred granting Tablack’s increase until after the Nov. 4 general election.
Commissioners Anthony T. Traficanti and John A. McNally IV won re-election that day by comfortable margins.
Tablack declined to comment on his pay increase.
milliken@vindy.com