Trumbull commissioners reject recommendation for deputies' pay hikes

By Ed Runyan

runyan@vindy.com

WARREN

Trumbull County commissioners have rejected a fact-finder’s report that called for pay and benefits increases for deputy sheriffs of 26.5 percent over three years, or nearly $600,000.

Frank Fuda, Trumbull County commissioner, said commissioners aren’t willing to give those kinds of increases. “We have to live within our budget. Apparently, the fact-finder’s not looking at that,” he said.

A union representative for the Ohio Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, however, says the fact-finder correctly observed that the county has the money to give pay increases.

Atty. Randall Weltman, the union’s negotiator, said county officials “play all sorts of tricks” to hide its surplus revenue.

The fact-finder recommended a 50-cent-per-hour pay increase for 2014 and 2015 and 25-cent-per-hour increase for 2016, as well as additional “step” increases of 25 cents per hour at the end of years 7 and 10, according to the report.

The workers at issue are 49 deputies, their union supervisors, cooks, custodial workers and clerical workers.

The deputies and their supervisors make an average of $21.16 per hour, said Jim Keating, the county’s human resources director. Cooks earn about $13.83 per hour, and clerical workers make about $15.60 per hour, Keating said.

The fact-finder, Floyd D. Weatherspoon, a law-school professor at Capital University in Columbus, said his recommendation represents a doubling of the pay increase the county proposed.

The county’s proposal would increase the county’s cost for wages and benefits for three years retroactive to Jan. 1, 2014, in the amount of $144,528 for deputies and their union supervisors and $36,182 for cooks, custodians and clerks for a total of $180,709, Keating said. That figure does not include the county’s share of health-care cost increases.

Weatherspoon said the fact that the county has offered a pay increase indicates one is warranted, but he is not willing to recommend other financial benefits the union wants, such as an increase in the amount the county pays toward pensions.

Because one of the parties has rejected the fact-finder’s report, the matter automatically goes to conciliation, which used to be called binding arbitration, Keating said. That process usually takes two months or more to complete.

According to Keating, the fact-finder’s recommendations would increase the county’s costs for wages and benefits by $471,059 for 2014 through 2016 for deputies and their supervisors and $116,320 over those three years for clerical workers, cooks and custodial staff for a total of $587,379. That number also wouldn’t include the county’s cost for health-care increases.

The fact-finder and Weltman said it is significant that the OPBA workers got no pay increase in 2009 despite the 3 percent pay increase other workers received in 2009.