02.16.22 Budget Workshop - Laserfiche WebLink

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City Council Meeting Minutes February 16, 2022 on for the next 3 to 5 years. This meeting continues that process and discussion will be on the Fiscal Year 2023 Budget Policy. Once approved, this policy provides the direction that will be shared with the directors to use as they prepare their department budgets. Staff does understand and share in the community concerns and Council's desire to keep the tax rate as low as possible, while still providing service levels for a growing community. Staffs success is Council's success and Council's success is the community's success. She stated we are all in this together. Along with the limits of our current funding abilities, especially in the General Fund, we are also dealing with the effects of the national dilemma of retaining a workforce that is rapidly changing due to individual lifestyle preferences and redefining of where careers fall on people's priority lists. In fact, a recent survey conducted by Principal Financial Group indicated that a third of workers are unsettled in their current job and are looking to change jobs, planning to retire, leave the workforce, or are on the fence about staying in their current job. Improving upon the core services the City provides to our community is largely dependent upon the talents and skillsets of our workforce. This is a challenge because we are working in an environment with lower employee morale coupled with Covid's emotional and economic impacts as well as not implementing our annual pay increases. Staff typically undertakes compensation studies where jobs are compared within our pay plan to those same jobs in our peer cities every three years and implement the study findings in the off years. This helps ensure we don't have to play catch-up or provide huge increases at any given time. A pay study hasn't been implemented since 2017. What you will hear today is that we have fallen behind by not keeping up with this practice and philosophy. It is exacerbated by being in the critical environment competing for talent and facing the great resignation. In addition, San Marcos is not a City as large as Austin, San Antonio or Houston which can pay employees more and create more specialized, narrowly -scoped jobs. Our job descriptions are broader — meaning we ask more of our employees - and we don't pay like they do. We have historically competed regionally for employees but in this virtual world everyone has grown more accustomed to, more jobs are offering 100% telework, thus increasing the scope of the market pool in which we are having to compete for talent. On top of pay, we aren't able to provide additional City of San Marcos Page 2