Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly’s administration has started the process of supplementing grant-funded positions with city dollars, which is part of a larger effort to ensure city employees earn a competitive wage.
Ellis Smith, the director of special projects in Kelly’s office, told the Chattanooga Times Free Press by phone on Monday that grant-funded positions have historically never been supported by city money.
For the first time, Smith said, Kelly’s administration began augmenting those positions with city funding earlier this year, starting with Head Start teachers. The city boosted the minimum wage for federal Head Start workers to $15.45 an hour in the fiscal year 2023 budget, equivalent to the minimum compensation for other positions across the organization.
Head Start teachers work with some of the city’s most vulnerable young children to ensure they have the tools to succeed in school and beyond. Chattanooga’s Head Start and Early Head Start program serves almost 1,000 infants, toddlers and preschoolers across Hamilton County.
“This is something that’s never hit the city budget before that we’re essentially committing to for the foreseeable future,” Smith said. “Unlike a grant, which lasts for a certain amount of time and you reapply for it, this is something that the city is going to be funding going forward from its budget.”
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Evaluating pay among Head Start teachers kicked off the process of sifting through compensation for all of the city’s grant-funded positions, Smith said. There are a total of 169. Next is the Office of Family Empowerment, which Smith anticipates could receive supplementary funding in the fall. That will likely appear before City Council as a budget amendment.
“In order to deliver the essential city services on which our residents depend, we have to offer essential pay and benefits to those workers,” Smith said. “We saw what happens when we don’t offer those essential pay and benefits: We have open positions, we don’t have enough firefighters to staff the fire stations, we have to worry about our response times.
“By bringing those salaries up to where they’re at a competitive market level, we’re able to fill the positions we need to fill and attract and retain the best talent.”
The municipality’s fiscal year 2023 budget, which the City Council approved June 14, included a 3% cost cost-of-living adjustment for municipal workers, raising the city’s minimum wage to $15.45 an hour. That built on a $30 million investment in employee pay the year before, which the mayor’s office said came at a time when it was losing workers and in danger of cutting back on essential services.
During the City Council’s June 14 meeting, three staff members from the Office of Family Empowerment addressed the panel to raise concerns about their pay, stating that significant understaffing and low compensation were affecting the office’s ability to serve at-risk families in the community.
Family Support Program Coordinator Kent Dickson was one of those employees and told the Times Free Press in a video conference Friday that he’s excited about the proposed change.
“We see this kind of as the city doing for us in a lot ways what we do for our clients,” he said, “so folks who are struggling to pay their rent, to pay their bills, the city’s showing up for our clients and saying, ‘Hey, we understand that you guys are having a hard time. We hear your requests.’ They’re putting together a pay plan now to give us the increases we need to bring us to a wage where we’ll be able to more stably afford our rent, our home energy bills, those kinds of things.”
Hourly staff in the Office of Family Empowerment start at $15, and other employees earn between $35,000 and $45,000. There are 15 employees in the office, but it’s budgeted for 21 positions.
“As with other city departments that have had pay adjustments, we expect that paying essential wages and benefits to our essential workers will help to fill our open positions and will better enable us to attract and retain talent,” Smith said.
As a stopgap, the city has provided retention bonuses to all employees in the Office of Family Empowerment, Smith said. Full-time staff received a $3,000 stipend, and part-time staff received $1,500, which the city paid for with grant funding.
“That was a way of bridging the income gap until we’re able to present the more permanent solution to council in the fall,” Smith said.
The Office of Family Empowerment has been part of the city in some form for at least 40 years and fights poverty through a variety of programs. It helps clients navigate existing resources, but the office also provides direct assistance for people catching up on energy bills or rent payments. The office saw demand increase during the pandemic.
“We saw a lot of people coming to us that had never sought services before,” Director Rachel Howard told the Times Free Press in a video conference Friday. “They didn’t know what to do or where to turn, and it was nice to be able to be there for those families during that time.”
Dickson said the office normally sees 40 to 120 inquiries for service in a single day, which, during the peak of the pandemic, could rise to a daily high of 200 or more.
“There’s been a huge increase, and it’s ongoing,” he said. “The economic impacts of the pandemic and the inflation market, specifically, and the way people’s rents and housing costs are going are still here in full swing.”
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Howard said many of the employees in her office are involved in that work because they’ve grappled with poverty firsthand and want to make sure others don’t experience the same hardship. Some of them have in the past relied on the Office of Family Empowerment or similar programs for assistance.
“That’s what brings meaning to their work,” she said.
Dickson said many employees in the office have foregone better pay in other departments or in the private sector because they care about their jobs.
“These increases that we’re planning to receive come October, they’re a way of saying to our staff, ‘You don’t have to choose between helping people and feeding your kids,'” Dickson said.
Contact David Floyd at dfloyd@timesfreepress.com or at 423-757-6249. Follow him on Twitter @flavid_doyd.