Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
The Watauga City Council held a workshop meeting on July 27, 2026, at 5:30 PM in City Hall Council Chambers. The meeting featured two presentations: the 2026 Compensation Study by Public Sector Personnel Consultants and an update on the Comprehensive Safety Action Plan by Burgess & Niple. Council members discussed findings, raised concerns, and outlined next steps for both items. No public comments were received.
Call to order that we're talking city council workshop meeting Monday, July 27th, 2026, City Hall Council Chambers at 5 30 p.m. First item of business roll call, place one. Thanks, Joe Born, President. Place two. Chris Blackburn present. Place three. Place four. Andrew Neal present. Place five. Stephen Wilkes, present. Place six. Mark Taylor here. Play seven. Jan Hill, present. And Mayor Artliner present. Ms. Prosky, any requests for public comment or public testimony? Okay. Number one, public sector personnel consultant presentation of the 2026 compensation study. Ms. Rodriguez. Yes, good evening, Council, Mayor, City Manager. Today we're going to be going over the just a second. There we go. We are going to be going over our 2026 compensation study that we did for 2027 planning. We have Matt Weatherly here from public sector personnel consultants to go over the results of that compensation study. So I'll hand it over to him. Good evening, Mayor, members of council. Appreciate the spot in front of you this evening. Prepared an overview of our work. We want to bring forth data to make good informed decisions when it comes time to budgeting, which I understand is kind of next week. Yeah, so coming up, you know, fast and furious, we uh kind of collected data to allow your decision makers and your staff to plug into the budget any reactions necessary to honor any stated or desired compensation philosophy or policy. We certainly want to fly a broader banner, recruitment, retention, uh, consistency, sustainability when it comes to what we do offer and budget for our staff salaries. Our scope of work called for the conduct of a base salary survey, compensation survey update to a 2024 effort that we had undertaken. Um so we do have some history with the city. This is, I think maybe our third uh salary survey with the the city where we review your job descriptions up against the market. We compare your salary structures uh to those that you are either in competition with and or have jobs like the city. So we do that at a job by job level. So I talk about that methodology. We do compare pay structures first. Uh the beauty in the public sector is that the neighboring cities, those that you're competing with, uh, have formal salary plans, it's public information. We can match up job descriptions based on actual job duties uh and at least make some inferences about one, how are we doing compared to our market? And the follow-up is kind of potentially part of this evening's conversation or any questions you might be able to, I might be able to answer. Now, but where do we want to be? Where do we need to be in order to retain our current staff and recruit new staff when we do have vacancies? Historically, there's a list of 10 agencies plus the private sector where we have collected data. We collect job descriptions, we collect salary plan information, we start to gather data, uh, really job by job, so that we understand where we are for our pay range that's afforded for each of our positions. The uh data is you know, kind of aggregated position by position, so that I can at least start to look at how we're doing year over year, or in this case every two years, what data is collected?