Planning District Commission Special Session   1/9/2025

Yes, I'm in the January 8th meeting to order right now.

And Christine, did I get the wrong date?

Oh, January 9th meeting.

Okay, thank you.

I'll take the roll.

Mr. Smith.

Supervisor Goolsby.

Supervisor Barlow.

Supervisor Reed.

Thank you.

Thank you.

This meeting of the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission is being held pursuant to code of Virginia subsection C of section 2.2 dash

3708.3, which allows a public body to hold all virtual public meetings.

This meeting is being held via electronic video and audio means through Zoom online meetings and is accessible to the public.

The method for holding this meeting shall not change unless a new meeting notice is provided.

Should the notice of excuse me, should the electronic transmission fail, you may reach out to the

TJPDC at REMERICK at TJPDC.org.

Notice has been provided to the public through notice at the TJPDC offices, to the media, website posting and agenda.

The meeting is held pursuant to the remote electronic participation and all virtual meeting policy as adopted by the commission on July 25th, 2024.

The meeting minutes will reflect that the meeting was held by electronic

Communication Means, and the type of electronic communication means by which the meeting was held.

Thank you, Ms. Emerick.

Next, do we have any public comments?

Now we'll move on.

Do we have any comments via email or any other form?

Okay, well, we'll go on to the regular order.

I apologize, I'm on my phone.

Yes, I will introduce the presenters this evening.

So good evening, everyone.

The TJPDC staff engaged the consulting services of Arthur J. Gallagher and Company to provide a classification and compensation study

This information will be utilized to inform our budget recommendations for fiscal year 2026 and beyond as it relates to personnel costs, which is approximately 75% of our total operational budget.

The goal of the study is to define the TJPDC's compensation philosophy to determine our level of competitiveness with our competitors

and ensure fair and equitable compensation packages going forward.

Here with us tonight is Sherry Balin.

She's a senior consultant and project manager from Gallagher.

They have prepared for us tonight a presentation to describe the project scope, the goals, deliverables and timeline, and to describe the purpose and importance of the compensation philosophy.

Following the presentation, Sherry will facilitate a compensation philosophy discussion

This will be the time when your participation is vital.

Our goal is to leave here tonight with clear understanding of your desired position for the commission.

Thank you, Ms. Greene and Ms. Fallon, thank you very much for being here tonight.

Thank you very much.

My name is Sherry Fallon.

I am a senior consultant here at Gallagher and I'm the project manager for this compensation study.

and I look forward to working with the Planning District Commission on this project.

We do have a quick presentation for you and please feel free during the presentation to stop me and ask questions if you'd like.

So again, for introductions, I'm meeting everyone here at Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission.

And on this project team with me moving forward will be the principal consultant, Michael Burton, myself, Shermaine, who is a consultant, and then Zhao Wen, who is a senior analyst.

And they will be the team working with me as we walk through the conversation study and looking at your jobs and pricing those against the market and your comparative organizations through a custom survey.

So the project scope overview, of course, we start with project administration.

That's where we are.

We're sort of coming out of that phase where we talk about the strength and the philosophy of where the commission would like to be.

We talk about the project orientation and scheduling regular.

What we do is biweekly meetings with Laura and team and Christine and Ruth to discuss any questions we have during the study and discuss progress and decision points.

and of course I'll serve as the project manager of that.

We are moving into the compensation study where we are facilitating stakeholder discussions to develop that compensation philosophy and where you would like to be in the market for your employees and their pay and we do talk about base pay.

We're going to do market data collection via a custom survey so we have about 20 organizations that you have named that are comparable organizations to yourself where we will go out and collect data from them on their comparable roles.

We will also have access to published survey data that hosts both public and private sector labor market data and of course we pull that data in because where you are in Charlottesville you compete against more than just the other planning districts, commissions and so we'll pull in some of that data as well to hopefully help you remain competitive in the market.

We'll look at your current structures and compare that to the market.

We'll look at practices and policies for simplification.

And we will put all of that together in a report for you so that you can see the results of your internal and external equity of your of your employee pay.

And then at the end we'll have a final report for you and any final presentations to any leadership or the commission that you would like us to host as well and then training for the staff so that you can continue with the administration of it once Gallagher has completed the study.

So the goals of this project currently is understanding where you currently sit against market and your current compensation philosophy, if you have one, and then determine where you would like to go with that philosophy, whether it's, and we'll get into this more, whether you'd like to lag the market, meet the market, or exceed the market.

We'll determine your current competitiveness against the external market and your comparator organizations along with that public and private

data in the published surveys.

And of course, as we walk through the study, we'll make sure that the structures and what we leave behind for you ensures fair and equitable pay based on the implementation of, again, it's race and gender neutral system for you that you'll be able to administer moving forward to keep your pay competitive and fair as you move through and you continue to hire and retain your current employees.

So we always like to go through this slide so that there's an understanding of what the project is and what the study is and what it is not.

Again, we will, what the study is is really to look at your jobs and the levels and to make sure they're accurately and consistently defined.

Make sure that any system that you have, if you'd like us just to update that, or that we leave behind is easy to understand, it's transparent, and that you'll be able to administer it once Gallagher is complete.

with a study.

Make sure that any policies and procedures are up to date and that they're equitable and that your compensation, as we look at all of your base pay, make sure that that is competitive and equitable and fair across the organization.

What it is not, and we really like to stress this, and this is really the most important piece, is this is not a study that is a strategy to reduce or increase pay.

Now, sometimes a study like this will have some increase in pay, but it's not the main purpose of the study.

It's not a staffing needs study, so we're not looking to see whether or not that job is necessary or how many of those positions, type positions you should have.

It's not an organizational structure study or a strategy designed to cut costs and it's definitely not a strategy to eliminate positions.

So as we walk through the project, of course you'll have a project manager, myself, to coordinate the activities and make sure you have all the deliverables that were in the proposal and the agreement.

We do have regular status meetings.

Right now we meet biweekly with your project team.

And again, we can schedule any other additional meetings as necessary to talk about the progress of the project or any decision making points that we need.

We'll have stakeholder meetings such as this one.

beginning the study as we just began and during and then at the end there'll be a final presentation to you to show you the results of the study and again there will be focus area communications where we will keep both leadership and whoever else needs you would like included updated about the project status and the process and where the study is going.

So at the end of this project, we will leave behind some deliverables.

Of course, employee and stakeholder communications will facilitate project discussions both right now in the beginning and then at the end.

You will have a compensation philosophy that is refreshed based on your current

We'll have a benchmark summary where you'll be seeing a comparison of your positions against the market both with your comparator orgs and that published survey data.

An updated one from the one you currently have based on the data we received back in both the custom survey and the published sources.

And of course, a presentation and report that you're able to have with you to read through that will have the methodology of this study and all of the results included.

So the project timeline is a five month project.

We are in phase one and we're coming out of phase one, which is about one month by the time we have our initial discussions, our initial presentations and meetings with stakeholders.

And we've gathered all the information like job descriptions and employee pay data and the items we need to continue with that study.

We are starting phase two where we have begun to build that custom survey for you and go out to the published survey market.

That takes about three months.

We're going to be administering the custom survey and then that data takes about a month to bring it back and we send it through an analysis and we meet the Federal Trade Commission guidelines when conducting a custom survey.

where all survey sources are bound by the FTC guidelines.

So we have an additional analysis we will run that through.

And then again, phase three is project finalizations, any presentations, or again, the final report.

And that takes about a month.

That will be towards the end of the project.

We will present all of those findings and results to key stakeholders.

I'll sort of pause here as I went through that pretty fast.

Are there any questions so far about the project and the phases of the project?

So now we'll talk about the compensation philosophy and reasons why it's important to have one and sort of the elements that go into it.

So the purpose of a compensation strategy and philosophy is to help people understand where the commission is as far as competitive pay.

It helps to determine your labor market, so those custom compared organizations and the published survey data.

It helps you determine a competitive position against the market.

So do you want to meet market and that's the 50th percentile.

And again, this is all based on sometimes affordability.

We also look at a compensation strategy can help you also determine internal equity of your

O'Brien, Tonya Swartzdorf,

and I'll help sort of help eliminate some of those areas where the pay may be tight between employees that you've had there for a little bit a while and those that you've just hired in.

And of course we do in the custom survey ask benefit questions to see how competitive your benefits are compared to your compare organizations.

All of these items are sort of put together to determine that compensation strategy and philosophy for the commission to move forward on into the future.

So why is a compensation philosophy so important?

It does help support your business strategy and manage labor costs.

By determining whether or not you say you want to meet market at the 50 percentile, you'll be able to see what the cost of that is and whether it's not affordable to be able to move forward with that in the future.

It does aid in attracting top talent and increase retention.

We have seen a lot of turnover

just post COVID with organizations losing top talent due to different reasons.

When remote work opened up, it opened up a lot of areas for people to sort of be able to take jobs with other corporations because they could work remotely and didn't have to relocate themselves and or their families.

So the compensation philosophy really does take that into consideration to help you retain and be able to hire top talent.

It helps to increase employee engagement and motivation where they see that if the philosophy is to meet market, say within eight years in their role, they know that the commission is there to help support that and move that forward.

It does ensure fairness and equity in pay as well and having a philosophy or even policies around pay administration on how to hire into the ranges or the structure and how to move your current employees through a structure as well.

It does ensure legal and regulatory compliance.

We do look at the Fair Labor Standards Act to make sure that's the appropriate designation, exempt versus not exempt.

So whether you're paid by the hour or you could be paid by a salary.

And of course, there's also other legal compliance laws such as the EEOC.

And of course, always compensation philosophy.

and a document having that promotes transparency and communication within the commission and to the employees.

So all of these putting all of these together really does help support your retention and recruitment of your top talent and your talent within your organization.

So part of the compensation philosophy discussion again is do you want to lag the market, and this is all based on budgetary constraints and what's available, is you can lag the market where that means that you would pay below the 50th percentile, that middle of the market.

And really when you meet the market, that 50th percentile, when people are there and they meet the market, they're seasoned employees in their role, probably around seven to eight years in their role.

So they, if you took, making up a title, an engineer, they should meet the market, if that market's $80,000, they should be at that $80,000 mark after they've been in their role for about seven, eight years.

And of course that's with satisfactory performance and they're doing their job

O'Brien.

You know, you may choose to pay the 75th percentile of the market where even where typically you would meet a 75th percentile of the market when you're 10 to 15 years in the role.

But you may decide we would like everyone there and able to recruit and retain employees at that position.

So at this point, with a compensation philosophy, really, when you think about how

If you have difficulty recruiting or even retaining your employees, we think about the market in those sort of terms of lagging, meeting the market and then leading the market.

So I guess we can open the discussion now or if there's any questions on all of this is where's the commission is today and where would it like to be?

Thank you, Ms. Fallon.

That's an excellent presentation and a good point for discussion.

So I'll open it up to the commissioners.

I have a question, or two or three.

And this may be a lot more about methodology than we want to deal with now, but we're using median figures.

To me, this implies that once you've plumbed the market and defined it, which I think is critical here, are we anticipating that things are going to be clustered tight enough

That median is really the number we should be looking and I say this just because, I mean here we are in rural Virginia but the Charlottesville real estate market is the most expensive place to live in Virginia.

even though it's in a rural area.

Are we looking at you know in the definition of the market and the median my question is can you talk a little bit more about how you define this market and what are and also the methodological point of using sort of median numbers and is that going to carry the water where a more

So what we do is when we go out to the market in both custom survey and the published survey sources is we actually pull the 25th percentile, the 50th and the 75th.

So you have the range of that data to be more informed on sort of that compensation philosophy and where you would like the organization to be and sort of, and again, what's affordable.

So when we go out to the market, the first thing we do is determine is where we need to look, right?

So Charlottesville,

When we pull data out of the publisher resources and emails, comparative organizations, we make sure that, first of all, all data is geographically adjusted to the Charlottesville, Virginia area so that it's apples to apples.

You've got your Charlottesville pay and we make sure the market is Charlottesville pay so that we are not comparing and making this up.

You know, you're not comparing your salaries to maybe something in Washington, D.C. That's not a fair comparison.

So we bring that all together and geographically adjust everything to Charlottesville, Virginia for you.

and then again we have all the percentiles and then we also look at the data where not only are we looking at Charlottesville, Virginia, we'll have the custom compared organizations that are like in similar organizations to your commission and we'll bring that in as well and even in the published survey sources we will bring in another data cut

for that's appropriate for planning district commissions and that's usually a public sector data cut and we bring that in as well because and part of the reason we still look at some private sector data but it's not going to be weighted you know there will be some more weight on public sector data cuts but you do have to consider private sector because you're in especially in Charlottesville and even now with remote work you're still competing against some of those private organizations

So we want to make sure that your structure is competitive enough for you to retain and recruit new employees.

But all that data we pull, we do pull all the percentiles 25th, 50th, and 75th so that you're well informed from the sort of entry level of that market all the way up to the high level of that market.

And then everything is geographically adjusted to Charlottesville so that it's apples to apples.

It helps a little bit.

What I'm really driving at here is that I understand the best practices of using median figures.

The issue that I'm looking at is that if our distribution is whacked,

which I expect it to be because of the geography, because of things that we can try to control for in our data but in fact it's really difficult, sort of nuance that I was just sort of querying, you know, do we get into a situation where, you know, I mean to take, you know, to take the

The medium at 50%, that's great, and our number is $80,000.

Well, if 50% are making $79,000 and 50% are making, and no one's making less than that, and everyone else is making 81 to a million, then I submit that our 50% medium is, what's the word I'm looking for here?

Right.

But I would look at your duties and responsibilities instead, right, in the minimum qualifications.

And then we match those to the roles both in the custom survey.

There'll be summaries of those roles with minimum qualifications to make sure that what we're matching is appropriate.

Now, we'll have an analysis that will show you title by title.

how your titles compare to the market and even from there you could have make strategic decisions saying that these roles we know we can still hire for them and we're competitive at the 50 percentile and we're comfortable with ranges at the 50 percentile for a salary structure to hire into and move people through but maybe you could target and I'm going to pick on IT a little bit like we always do

We know we're having a hard time recruiting for these.

You know, you might have a different, a slightly different compensation philosophy for IT positions because they're difficult to recruit for.

And you might say, and I'm just making this up, we need to more target the 75th percentile because we need to be able to bring people in and top talent for IT so they can build our systems or keep our, you know, our, our systems safe.

You know, cybersecurity, cybersecurity is a big one now, right?

With everything being online.

So you can, by individual, even titles, once you see that analysis, and I think once you see the individual analysis, it'll be, we can have another discussion, but you might wanna make different targeted compensation philosophies based on some of the data you have, maybe for turnover, retention, and items like that, especially ones that are, I would say high turnover, very hard to recoup for, and I'll just use IT as an example.

All right.

Yeah, but we'll make sure.

So when we look at the market, say we're looking at an engineer, if our market data came in at 50,000,

But we're looking at your data and say you're paying $100,000.

We know something's wrong there.

We have to go back and revisit those matches because the variance on that is never that large, right?

So we would go back and we would talk about those jobs and say, OK, now let's talk about those jobs.

And were they described appropriately?

Were the minimum qualifications appropriate?

And then we would go back and visit that market again.

So again, this really is based on current job descriptions.

So we might have to have those discussions, too,

Are these accurately described?

Okay.

We certainly can.

We can pull the averages out of the survey sources as well.

I think that would be very helpful.

I of course look at people's compensation all day and I would just say that when putting that particularly in this market with compensation versus

D'Oronzio, David Blount.

I think James is right and I appreciate him sort of making that prod.

Yeah, I'd like to see the average versus median.

We play that game in the affordable housing of median income in the area and what that really means.

You know and an example of that is well look I mean at 50% AMI and 50% of the people are making $49,000 and 50% are making $51,000 well and virtually nobody's making less than $49,000 that's great nobody's making $49,000 but

Half the population is making 51 or more and everybody else is making less than 10.

Our median income is still 50 grand, but we still have a huge disconnect.

So that's why, I guess that's what I was poking at.

I think James did a much better job than I was in clarifying the pointy end of the spear.

So we do have the availability in these survey sources.

And even when we especially when we aggregate the custom survey data, because we have all the data, we will be able to take the 25th, 50th, 75th and get the average of all the pay that for whoever participates.

Right now, we do have to follow a word of caution on the custom survey.

We do have to follow the Federal Trade Commission guidelines where in order to aggregate data back to you, there has to be at least five data points

from five organizations.

So we only hear from three organizations, we're not able to aggregate that data and

and sort of aggregate it back to you in any sort of percentile or averages because we don't allow, you know, there's the Sherman Antitrust Act that comes into play here.

So by all means, I mean, let's look at the antitrust problems of planning district commissions as opposed to, I don't know, grocery stores.

So, yeah, but we do have to follow the Federal Trade Commission and make sure we're not violating the Sherman Antitrust Act as well.

So we will aggregate that data in at least five data points.

And I believe currently we have about 20 computer organizations that's been determined by

your project team.

So we're hoping to get a really good return back on that because if they participate in the custom survey, they actually get a free copy of the results.

And that's something we tell them that maybe all your computer organizations are also looking, hopefully looking for this data as well.

And that's a service we can provide back to them through that custom survey.

So, but yes, we can definitely get the averages as well.

And then just as an anecdote, our internal team came up with that list of 20.

And if it's helpful, that includes local government, regional bodies, such as Planning District Commission, state government, federal government, and private sector planning or consulting firms, if that's helpful.

I'm happy to actually share that list if you'd like to.

I have that available currently.

Please do.

I think that's kind of the fundamental question is, you know, and I think when you look at the agenda, when we talk about philosophy, which is a nice way of putting it in terms of saying, where do you think you want to be where you need to be in order to meet the goals?

I think that's a really relevant question.

I'd kind of ask the,

commissioners to step outside of it and say, what is our philosophy?

Not get into the weeds, but what is our philosophy at the end of the day?

Should the TJPDC be in the median?

Should they be above the median?

Should they be well above the median or should they be below?

I think that's the critical question.

Well, Mr.

Chair, I'd also sort of add to that, that in addition to where are we lagging, leading, or in the middle of the road with the yellow lots and the dead armadillos, the other larger question is what follows

Beyond just the compensation, right?

We've got the benefits, the culture, the equity pieces, which equity they're talking, I get you're talking in the Wall Street sense, not in the DEI sense in this, at least primarily here, which, I mean, I think that's worth the conversation.

What do we call equity in this organization?

Is there any?

Do we have a stalking horse for what we call equity?

Is benefits and PTO and flexibility more important than money?

Many years ago, when my family relocated to Tampa, Florida, my father was trying to repay

can recruit people to university positions there and in context with his job.

And one of the things he would say to folks, of course to give you an idea of how long ago this was, he'd say, look, the sunshine in the water is worth $15,000 a year.

Now it's probably worth $50,000 a year.

But I mean, his point's well taken.

X dollars here, you might take less money here as opposed to being in Minneapolis if you have an aversion to frostbite, for example.

So I think it's a larger question, just do we want to lead follow?

Well, and I think that's a great point, Mr. Gjorgjiev, but I would also add to that, which is, you know, for us, esoterically looking at it from the outside because we don't make

the interviews, we don't do the interviews, we don't make the hiring decisions per se.

The question boils down to how competitive and how capable are we at attracting talent into the organization and making sure that organizationally, not only are we meeting the needs and everything that we need to do for the GAPTC commission, but also are we ensuring that

that our employees are satisfied, happy, able to grow and feeling like they participate without being, I don't wanna say overburdened, but that they participate and feel that they are able to make a difference

I think right now it's just awareness, right?

So we've just begun the study and as we, and I think, you know, we could have another discussion as we move forward and we actually see the results of some of the market data that we get back, hopefully through the custom survey and the published survey to see how competitive base, right now we're looking at base pay, how competitive that base pay is, right?

And then talking to your project team,

about recruiting retention, you know, and where some maybe sticky points might be or some positions might have 30% turnover or others might have 1% turnover or no turnover and start making some more strategic decisions on, you know, why is it turning over?

Is it base pay?

Or in the custom survey, we are going to ask some questions like how much do these other organizations, how much

PTO time do they give, vacation sick, personal days, holidays, and maybe you give three weeks of vacation and the results may come back that on average these other organizations give six.

And everybody is in a different stage of life where things are going to mean, vacation time will mean more to somebody than others in the organization.

But you'll be able to see that overall for benefits as well.

And so right now, it's basically more informational for you to think about it.

And as we get some of the results back, that will then be where you think you want your compensation philosophy to be and say it is the middle of the market when someone's been in their role about seven, eight years.

I mean, to me,

Philosophically speaking, if the TJPDC is setting itself aside as a leader in the planning community, it certainly seems to me that we should not be lagging in compensation and or the ability to attract quality employees to the TJPDC.

We should be in the forefront is the way I would put it in terms of philosophy.

We shouldn't be the ones that are sort of, well, you know, I could go to Albemarle and get a better job than what I have at the TJPDC.

I think that's critical.

I mean, I think if we are trying to brand ourselves, we need to make sure that we are attracting and retaining quality employees across the board.

That's my philosophy on that.

Well, I think we sit here today knowing what lagging the market has done for us.

It hasn't worked very well.

So as a strategy, as far as I'm concerned, that's not even something we should be considering.

Leading the market,

Just from a strategy standpoint, ends up being the only option to really try to get after things.

It's just then trying to figure out where you need to level set your different salaries.

I mean, this is all in my opinion.

When you pull this data, the private data is going to skew all the salaries up.

I would imagine the PDC salaries will probably pull it down because all the PDCs are probably lagging with the exception of smaller local governments out there.

I mean, looking at the ones you've pulled, I don't think any of those public localities would be at 80% or 60% or 70% as a strategy.

So all of this data, I mean, it's probably going to hit us right between the eyes, this information.

And it will tell us, it will further inform us as to why lagging the market is a terrible idea.

and then we'll have to deal with that, make decisions from budgeting and all of that.

So from a strategy standpoint, leading the market is where I would fall just because history has shown us that the problems that exist with keeping staff and pulling staff into the TJPDC has just been problematic.

So we can't continue to beat our head against that wall.

And I guess on top of that is, I mean, is base pay, we get to a level where you can say, okay, every, you know, your prospective candidates or retained employee is content with that, or merely content with that.

That's probably sufficient if there are other things to keep them.

quality of life means a lot.

So that sort of leads into, okay, what sort of organization is this?

But yeah, I agree with the Supervisor Galloway on that is that we've seen, but being a step behind is done.

I do think that it sort of begs the question in terms of if you are putting yourself as the expert, the source that you can go to, that you can lean on, certainly the quality of the employees that you bring onto the table and that you attract is critical.

And if you're lagging behind and that's known within the community, the playing community,

That does not bolster your case by any means.

I mean, we should definitely recognize that there is an aspect to being leaders and that we are the consultants.

You mean the consultant in the sense of the consultancy that this commission engaged in?

Exactly.

I mean, we are in the consultant's business, right?

I mean, we do a lot of things that are necessary across the board to support surrounding communities.

Yeah.

So this is a question, I guess, more for Christine and management here.

But the question is, if we are going to get a little forward on our speeds and compensation, what is the dynamic of, and I'm really being reductionist about this, right?

We say, look, you know, you're hired at this pay rate.

You've got a lot of freedom in what you do.

We've moved up, we've moved up in the compensation plan, the benefit plan, the flex time.

We expect a lot, if that's the case too, even if it's not just the dollar, but that leads to the broader culture and how that connects to our philosophy of compensation.

Yeah, I don't know if this is gonna answer your question, but-

You know, with the getting out ahead of our skis, you know, we are firing right now public servants at heart, people who really care about what they do and are good at what they do and know they can make more elsewhere.

And they like the culture and they want to work here, but it's really hard to give up.

I'm not concerned about raising the bar.

I think we have a very high bar right now.

I mean, I agree with that 100%.

I wasn't trying to imply that they weren't.

I was trying to put that as a baseline.

It's like, look, our compensation is what it is.

We're being as strong as we possibly can.

We're being as strong as we possibly can on all of the things that come into this philosophy, be it benefits and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And I guess what you're telling me is, yeah, I mean, we don't have to worry about

I mean, I found that to be true everywhere.

Yeah, I would also say that part of the impetus for doing this study, first of all, it is to recruit really top talent to be competitive, but it's also to keep the really great talent that we have.

A lot of times, TJPDC, but also PDCs in general, are bringing on talent.

They're keeping people for three to five years.

And then they have to move somewhere else in order to take that next professional step.

And we want to make sure that this is a place that they can make that growth internally, because we have a system, we have a ladder of opportunity within our organization that makes them still be able to grow and get better opportunities here.

And I guess, although we talked about what the study is and what it isn't,

This is also largely about professional development and career path and what we can accommodate.

And frankly, we're a small organization.

Yeah, and looking at our current salaries and the compression, there's only so much growth a person can make before they begin to hit up against that next level.

So everybody's got to raise anytime anybody rises, if that makes sense.

So do we have some thoughts from other commissioners here in terms of philosophy and guidance for the Gallagher Group?

I know you're sitting there.

First and foremost, thank you, Mr. Chairman, for allowing me to speak.

Sorry, my chair is really low and my camera's really high, so you're just gonna see half my face.

Less is better, I assure you.

Yeah, that's fair.

I certainly believe, talking to some of the industry people out there who would often hire TJPDC staff into their roles,

You know, some of the stories that I heard was during hard times, TJPDC was always at the forefront because when times crashed, TJPDC was getting a lot of talent because talent was available.

In times where you have a housing boom, you have a lot of developments happening, that talent often gets swooped in after they got their, you know, first two years of experience at the PDC with the relationships that they gained.

Those relationships can range from the DMV, some of the various entities that we work with, and some of those entities even absorb our staff as well.

So I certainly believe we need to be above median.

You know, we need to figure out what that number is.

I certainly can tell you definitely greater than 60%.

I think that's a reasonable expectation.

It makes us competitive.

I certainly do believe that though I believe the PDC is a place where our staff can find a lifelong career if some individuals might find themselves to where this is some level of a stepping stone just as my business is as well.

and I have no issues with anybody who wants to improve what their career path is.

For their upward mobility there's probably a couple spots, you know, they're not going to become an executive member most likely and, you know, depending on where they're at in their career we're the best place to get a start and we're also the best place for good talent in our area to have a stable career.

Because I'll tell you this, in terms of bad times, this entity keeps going.

Bad times for other engineering firms, they can tell you what the alternative is.

It's a lot of layoffs.

But we do need to be competitive, especially with the limited amount of upward mobility amongst our PDC.

And we need to definitely be looking greater than median.

I am certainly struck by your point of saying this is a great place to get a start.

I think everybody recognizes that the TJPDC has a unique opportunity to create and leverage connections and experiences.

But I would say that we should be reversing our mentality, which is to say, this is where you get your start.

This is where you go when you've proven that you've done the right things elsewhere.

I think that's fundamental in my opinion.

And I think that, you know, press, you know, we haven't had that philosophy that we've taken that philosophy that says, you know, okay, this is the place that you get your start and then you get rid of somewhere else because of these connections.

Mr.

This is Manning.

I think everybody has really good points, has made those points.

I certainly agree with you and pretty much with everybody.

We need to be somewhere certainly higher than the middle.

We just, we need to make sure we determine that.

That's all.

Anyone else?

I do.

I think we have some options.

And so as we move forward and pull that data to the custom and public survey sources, I'll make sure that we're pulling

you know, the appropriate percentiles of 50th and above, right?

50th, 60th, 65th, so that there's options because we will come forward to you with options so that you can see the affordability of all of those options.

Very well.

Yes.

So you will be able to look at it.

several different ways just your compared organizations you know I have high hopes we'll get some of that data back so we'll be able to aggregate it and again then you'll see it versus combined with the custom and the published and then if you just want to see the published right if there's just but what we can do again even with that data is you can wait put some weight

More to the public sector and the custom data and maybe lower the weight on the private sector, but still factor it in because you are still competing against them.

So there's different things we can do and we can continue to talk about that if you'd like when we get to that point.

Thank you.

Any other questions?

For Ms. Fallon.

Well, if not, Ms. Fallon, thank you very much for your time and your expertise.

We really do appreciate it and we look forward to hearing your recommendations.

Moving on to other business, our next meeting will be February 6, 7 p.m. We will be doing new member orientation.

We'll get a review of the Rideshare Work Program.

as well as the path mobility management and grant application and an amendment to the draft budget for 2025 and the FY25 quarter two financial report, which I'm sure we're waiting with bated breath.

I want to thank everybody for being here tonight, unless there's anything else.

You're headed to Amy now.

Very well.

I think that's Mr. Rutherford.

Is that correct?

So we have a motion for Mr. d'Oronzio, a second for Mr. Rutherford.

The motion, do anybody object?

Everybody agree?

Yes.

Yeah.

All right.

Excellent.

Thank you very much for all of your time and a Happy New Year to all of you.

And

Thank you.

Good night.

Good night.