Hamilton County commissioners did an odd thing Wednesday. In effect, they voted to raise the pay of previous commission chairmen and vice chairmen going back six years but to keep the pay of the current chairman and vice chairman and those going forward the same as it is now.
Kindly people, those commissioners, to think of their predecessors.
In truth, a legal hiccup suggested the back pay, and commissioners likely wanted to avoid any - however unlikely - legal problem.
Only one of the six people who will receive back pay, Fred Skillern, who will receive $8,879 (plus the required Social Security match for all six), the largest amount of any of the six, is no longer a county employee. Former Commissioner Jim Coppinger ($1,073) is now the county mayor, and former Commissioner Larry Henry ($5,250) is now the Hamilton County Circuit Court clerk.
The rest, Jim Fields ($6,969), Chester Bankston ($5,318) and Randy Fairbanks ($3,280), are still on the commission.
The change came out of a County Attorney Rheubin Taylor-led legal meeting several weeks ago. Commissioners, it seems, had been operating on a pay structure set by a 1999 memo and not the 1990 resolution that should have governed the pay of the chairman and vice chairman.
To set things right, a resolution was proposed last week that would give the chairman and vice chairman 40 and 30 percent pay bumps, respectively, atop the regular commission salary of $22,786. That would be in line with what the 1990 resolution said, albeit for a much smaller base salary. And the back pay - for six years due to the statute of limitations - would keep the county out of any potential lawsuit.
However, Fields introduced an amendment that would keep the pay bumps at the current $5,000 and $2,500 levels, respectively. When Commissioner Warren Mackey asked for more time to consider the amendment, Taylor said the county finance department needed the commission to act quickly. The amendment then passed 6-2, and the amended resolution passed 8-0.
In haste to pass the amendment and resolution, commissioners missed - or perhaps chose not to contest - the fact that the extra pay for the chairman and vice chairman no longer will be in line for percentage pay increases. The commissioners' base salary still will increase at the same percentage as the county mayor's does, per current law, but not the set $5,000 and $2,500 for the top two leaders.
We applaud the commission for keeping its fiscal belt tight but also know many commissioners work far more than a part-time job in their positions. If in the future they want to change their current pay set-up, we hope they'll publicly debate the efficacy of asking legislators to untie their salaries from the county mayor's and go from there.