Legislation that would overhaul the state's pay plan sailed through the Senate on Thursday afternoon.
A 34-0 vote sent Senate Bill 289 by Sen. Bart Hester, R-Cave Springs, to the House for further discussion.
The proposed pay plan would cover about 25,000 full-time state workers and officials project that it would cost about $57 million to implement in the fiscal year that starts July 1. The average annual salary for these employees is about $38,500.
About $24 million of the increased cost of the overhaul in fiscal 2018 is projected to come from general revenue, with the remainder coming from other state government revenue sources, Department of Finance and Administration spokesman Jake Bleed said this week. The plan wouldn't cover employees at the state's higher-education institutions, legislative agencies, constitutional officers, the Highway and Transportation Department and the Game and Fish Commission.
To finance the implementation of the overhauled pay plan, agencies "will utilize accrued savings from efficiencies and attrition, and if this is not sufficient, they may request merit adjustment funds," Bleed said.
About 54 percent of these full-time employees would get pay raises of more than 1 percent each to enable them to reach the new minimum salaries for their positions, and the rest would get 1 percent raises, according to the state's personnel director, Kay Barnhill. State employees aren't getting cost-of-living raises in the current fiscal year, 2017.
The current pay plan was adopted in 2009 and the labor market has changed dramatically since then, Barnhill said.
Some of the larger raises would be in entry-level positions. The plan overhaul would benefit workers such as family-service workers, program eligibility specialists, registered nurses, residential-care assistants, correctional officers and state troopers, according to state records.
Officials said they intend to begin rewarding employees with merit pay raises that increase base salaries, rather than continue using one-time bonuses as they have done for the past several years.
The proposal would create four compensation tables to replace the current two tables. There would be a general salary table, information-technology salary table, medical professional salary table and senior executive salary table.
The general salary table would range from $22,000 to $140,592, while the information-technology table would range from $33,403 to $161,681, the medical professional table would range from $63,830 to $270,455, and the senior executive table would range from $108,110 to $201,700.
A Section on 02/24/2017