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Mahoning officials discuss compensation in executive session
YOUNGSTOWN
The Mahoning County commissioners went into executive session twice at the beginning of a Thursday staff meeting to launch a consultant’s study of compensation and classification of county employees.
They first was a brief executive session to receive legal advice from their lawyer, Kevin Kralj, an assistant county prosecutor.
Then, they momentarily went back into public session, only long enough to vote to return to executive session to discuss employee compensation.
The commissioners did, however, fulfill a Vindicator reporter’s request for a written outline of the kickoff teleconference they went on to have in executive session with their study consultant, Evergreen Solutions LLC of Tallahassee, Fla.
On June 30, the commissioners approved a $65,000 agreement with Evergreen for the study, designed to compare county employees’ compensation with that of their peers performing similar tasks in other government entities and in private business.
The teleconference outline projects completion of the final study report in December.
There was no reference in the public session on this issue, which totaled less than three minutes, to any discussion that would occur in executive session concerning compensation or classification of individually-named county employees.
The county has 1,854 employees, of whom 1,526 are full time.
When the commissioners approved the agreement with Evergreen, Audrey Tillis, executive director of the county commissioners, said county coroner’s investigators and entry-level juvenile-detention corrections officers here are among county employees who are underpaid for their skills.
At the entry level, hourly pay for coroner’s investigators is $12.01; janitors, $12.69; and juvenile corrections officers, $13.10; Karen U’Halie, county human-resources director, reported immediately after the commissioners hired Evergreen.
The Florida public-sector management consulting company has conducted more than 250 employee-compensation and classification studies in 43 states.
The public session discussion was extremely limited.
“If we’re going to get into the particulars of what we would like to see and what we would like our agenda to be for this meeting, I would imagine we should probably go into executive session until we find out exactly what areas we’re going to identify that we need the most help in,” said Carol Rimedio-Righetti, chairwoman of the county commissioners.
“I don’t want to do that in open session with the other two commissioners because I just don’t know if what we’re going to ask you about different departments is going to be something that should be public right now,” she told U’Halie.
“We are going to be talking about compensation philosophy, and there’s not going to be any decisions made today. This is the introduction, but I think the board needs to have an open conversation with our vendor,” U’Halie replied.
“I wasn’t prepared to have a big discussion about executive session or nonexecutive session, but, generally, you could go into executive session to discuss compensation ... I think we need to go into executive session to have a discussion about legal” advice, Kralj said before the commissioners voted to go into the first closed-door meeting.
Later on Thursday, the commissioners conducted a closed-door staff meeting on cybersecurity with numerous key county officials, including Jake Williams, information-technology director.
Rimedio-Righetti said before that meeting that there have been no recent credible cyber-security threats to the county government.
“We’re just being a little pro-active,” she said.