County OKs tweak in officer pay

COEUR d’ALENE — A sheriff’s office plan to provide promotion incentives between the ranks was approved Monday by commissioners.

Sheriff Ben Wolfinger asked commissioners to lift parameters placed on how to use money allocated in next year’s sheriff’s office budget, so he could tweak the direction of the funding.

Under Wolfinger’s plan, lieutenants would no longer be exempt from overtime pay, and margins between some ranks would increase in an effort to make promotions more valuable.

Under the plan, the difference in pay between a top-end sergeant and a new lieutenant would be 3 percent, but lieutenants would be allowed to be paid for overtime work.

The plan calls for increasing the spread by 3 percent between a top-end lieutenant and a new captain.

The change is slight, and will account for about $25,000 of a special $620,000 allocation for sheriff’s office pay in next year’s budget.

“Every pay study done during my tenure at Kootenai County has recommended a spread of 5 percent to 15 percent between ranks,” Wolfinger said.

Without tweaking the exemption status and pay scale between the ranks of top sergeant and lieutenant, for example, the pay difference could potentially be less than 1 percent, leaving little incentive for a sergeant to test for a lieutenant position.

“Since lieutenants are exempt employees it is logical that a sergeant could make significantly more money than a lieutenant when you add in the anticipated overtime that sergeants receive,” he said.

Most of the tentative allocation, though, would be used to increase deputy pay.

“The bulk of the money goes to line-level people,” Wolfinger said. “Deputies are going to get a raise, detention deputies are going to get a raise.”

The infusion would also help in retention efforts, Wolfinger said.

Commissioner Bob Bingham, however, said migration by experienced deputies to other departments is a national phenomenon among sheriffs’ offices, and probably not something the pay bump would fully address.

“For me, across the nation it’s pretty standard that rural law enforcement typically makes less than city,” Bingham said. “I’m accepting that norm. I’m not interested in keeping up with the city rate.”

Commissioner Chris Fillios said the tentatively set budget addresses pay primarily for deputies — patrol and detention deputies — and sergeants.

“Quite a bit of money is going into those two groups.” Fillios said.

And although department pay still falls short of many municipalities, the pay increase will help keep deputies from looking to work elsewhere.

“I think we’re doing an increasingly better job of retention,” he said. “That’s key here.”