Planning District Commission Finance Exec Committee   4/10/2025

Okay, folks, thank you for your patience.

We're gonna go ahead and start the meeting.

I have started the recording.

We are going to work to get the chair in as we go so that we can just go ahead and start.

All right, looks like he's coming on now.

All right, Mr. O'Brien, it looks like you're connected.

If we can try sound.

No problem.

I was going to say, that's what I was going to say.

Yep.

All right.

I do too, because you're not officially in the meeting until he's voted.

Roll call.

Oh my goodness.

We've been talking about baseball.

That's hilarious.

I call this meeting to order.

A roll call?

Here?

Mr. Smith.

OK. Now can you all take action in order to get him into the meeting?

Yeah.

I would move to allow Chair O'Brien to participate by electronic communication.

I would second that.

Any state your reason?

You need to take the vote and then I can do that.

Well, yeah.

Chair makes a motion.

Treasurer or Vice Chair makes a motion.

Aye.

Aye.

Okay, so I'm called in.

I am calling in from my office.

My reason is, well, the notice came up that I needed to be there and I wasn't there.

So that's why.

So I'm embarrassed.

That is the actual truth.

And I would be in my car if my phone was working driving over there to get there as quickly as possible, but my phone's not working.

Let's move this on to number three.

All right, on to item number three.

You can start over.

We need to do number two, not number three.

I'm happy to pass the gavel to the man if he's doing it.

The item number two, consent agenda minutes of March 6, 2025, Finance Executive Committee meeting.

I approve the minutes as written.

So this is the one we want to go to now.

All right, we're going to turn this one over to Sherry Fallon.

She was here with us last month as well.

So we're going to do a quick high level review of what we discussed last month and then jump right into a scenario recommendation from staff.

Take it away, Ms. Fallon.

So after the last meeting,

We walked through several options of what the planning district would like to see for a revised salary structure.

And we ended up settling on to come to the table with three options.

And there was option one, which was at the 50th percentile of the market with, of course, using the blended rolls.

Option two, the 75th percentile of the market, again, with using blended rolls.

And then we had option, it was option five, which we have renamed option 3A, which was somewhere in the middle between the 50th and 75th percentile.

And again, using additional years of prior relevant experience, both outside and inside of the planning district.

As we

went back after your recommendations of what you would like to see.

We narrowed those down.

We came up with option 3B, and that is based on where you wanted to be after the compensation philosophy discussion.

We went and we used the salary structure that's between the 50th and 75th so that you're leading the market and you can hopefully be an employer of choice and also went back to sort of look at what would be affordable for the commission within that structure and some of that meant making some adjustments to the sort of how we weighted prior relevant experience

and Laura and Christina and Ruth worked on that and they came up with a more reasonable amount of weighting and also looked at the time and seat adjustment where we originally were doing at a percent and a half and they moved that to give credit for the amount of time in a roll to 2.2 percent.

So with those further adjustments, we also looked at sort of the roles within the commission and how wide we had some of the salary ranges and based on a proper career path and how long you would stay in certain roles before you grow into the next.

We did narrow some of those down a little bit and we made some others and we kept the others at about

about 50 percent wide and then we narrowed some all the way between 25 and 35 percent wide depending again you look at through the career path of how long someone would stay in that role so if we took the planner career path you have planner one through four and senior planner you typically wouldn't stay in planner one too long you might gain two three years of experience and you'd move on to planner two so we made planner one a little bit more narrow

So we went back and made all of those adjustments.

Laura asked a question, are the slides advancing in your view?

They are not.

I'm going to share and start over because it's advancing for us and it's not advancing for you.

That is wild.

All right, I'm doing it again.

This is, here we go.

Whatever works for you, it's fine for me.

So this is the recommended option 3B that where

Laura and Ruth and Christina went back to the drawing board on the weights for prior relevant experience and of course we adjusted some of those salary range widths based on sort of what a proper career path would look like through the organization.

So what was assumed to go to option 3B is 2.25% increase per year for every year someone has been in their current role.

And we also accounted for the 3% COLA adjustment that would potentially take place July 1st.

So we accounted for that as well.

And then the assumed weightings for prior experience, excuse me, it was 10% for some prior relevant experience and 15% for time in the organization in another role.

And then the costing, again, bringing everyone to minimum, and then you'll see the additional cost of bringing everyone to a position in range using the time and seat with the additional years of experience adjustments, excuse me.

So the implementation cost for 3B over one year is about $268,000.

And then if you wanted to adjust in a two year period, it's a little bit more money because again, you trend everything forward to stay current with the market.

It's about $346,000.

And then over three years, it goes up a little bit more to almost $418,000.

And again, this does include the 3% COLA increase as well.

So here is what that structure with the revised assumptions would look like.

It's a little bit different than we showed before, given the different widths of the salary ranges, but this is what ultimately the structure would look like under this option.

And then on this screen, we wanted, again, to bring back to all of you the cost of what each option would look like after we made all of the same assumptions in all of the options, 1, 2, 3A, and then 3B.

3B is the recommended choice based on, I know Laura and Ruth and Christine have been working on the budget.

What we are highly recommending right now is option 3B after we made all of the adjusted assumptions.

And that's an increase of about $268,000.

Here's where I would love for us to open it up to discussion questions, dig into any details that you guys want to know before we bring this recommendation to the full commission for their review.

Right now it is the one year option.

If you guys were to give us direction in the commission, were to give us direction to go with option 3B, I would then be going back into the budget, making sure I can balance it and bring it to you in May.

We still have quite a few unknowns in our budget because we're waiting on DRPT, FTA, we're waiting on numbers for grants from their six year improvement plan.

So I will be able to know by May if we can do it in one or two years.

Am I oversimplifying it that if we take the two year portion,

No, that is what you would do.

What you'd sort of do is split it in half, so to speak.

If you could do a little bit more, then we would make different adjustments from there.

That is between 50th and 75th.

So it is the middle between 50th and 75th.

So it's here.

It's in the middle of these two.

It's between 50% and 75% of the market.

Where people fall in those bands will be determined on their prior experience, the years in seats.

So the first calculation we had to do is, how much would it take to adjust them to the minimum?

And then we needed to do another calculation to say, where should they be within that band?

So that's dependent on individuals.

I think it's pretty much in line with what we spoke about.

I think what the board was leading or the committee was leading in that direction.

I think that we would all love to get to the 75%, but we recognize that's a big jump.

And I think to Mr. Payne's point of trying to stay in mind with not having to do another ask to the localities is probably a good idea.

And then of course the unknowns in terms of

What's going to happen with some of the grants that we have?

And that's not just for the TJPDC, but for the localities as well.

Everybody's finishing up this budget year, but next budget year is going to be, I think, very challenging for a lot of boards.

Right now, my preliminary budget shows me that I can.

If we get any surprises on grants that we're used to receiving that we do not receive, we may need to revisit that.

Let's say it goes wonky on us after we approve all this stuff, we have to come up with cash reserves and make up the shortfall, right?

Yes.

There are other revenues that we are anticipating that I have not incorporated in, because I wanted to do the most conservative, can we make this possible or not?

And that's one of the reasons staff is really leaning into that option three instead of the 75th percentile, because we were showing that while we may be able to do it across two years, it didn't feel like it would be sustainable.

It would be dependent upon always getting what we have right now and then some in order to be able to keep that.

This is shown as an action item.

It is.

I don't have any concerns.

Does anybody else have concerns there?

So I will make a motion that we move forward option 3B.

Is there a second?

Second.

All those in favor?

Motion passes.

I'll have you adjourn.

But what we're going to do is we're going to leave this Zoom call.

I'll be there.

And David, I'm forwarding you something to print off for the commissioners, OK?

OK. All right.

Jesse told me he made you do all the work last time.

Today.

Mr. O'Brien, if that's related to my review, can you actually send it to Ms. Greene as the HR director?

Yes, okay.

Well then, if you will adjourn the meeting.

Thanks, Michael.