Shoshone County to reduce pay increases for employees

WALLACE — Last week, the Shoshone Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) elected to reduce the amount of the county’s cost of living adjustment (COLA) for their employees for the upcoming fiscal year.

As the BOCC sought to finalize the county’s 2023/24 fiscal year budget, it became clear that funds were going to be tight across the board if they stayed at the 7% COLA that had been set in place last summer by the previous board.

Initially, the board tried to factor in a 5% COLA, as they worked on the budget, but that figure did not allow them to meet the budgetary needs of the various departments.

At the county level, the COLA refers to an increase in an employee's rate of pay based on estimates of how much money is required to maintain a given standard of living. These pay adjustments are applied to wages or salaries, and benefits packages and are intended to offset inflation.

Making a determination on the COLA had to be in place before the rest of the budget could be determined because the money for these raises would affect the board’s ability to dedicate funds to the different departments as needed.

Commissioners Tracy Casady and Jeff Zimmerman seemed to be in agreement that a reduction was necessary, but the numbers that they each settled upon did not line up.

Casady believed that 3% was the proper number, while Zimmerman reluctantly suggested 1%.

The discussion was tense, due largely in part to the fact that the decision would affect the wages of their roughly 150 employees — a concern that is shared by all three commissioners, as well as the various other elected officials and department heads who have these employees.

The final decision … Shoshone County employees will receive a 1% COLA for the coming fiscal year.

Reducing the COLA won’t negatively impact the current wages of the employees — however, by not staying in line with the current rate of inflation, the reduction at which their pay is adjusted means that their spending power will be reduced in the current economic climate.

During much of the previous decade, beginning in 2012 and running through 2021, the average rate of inflation was below 2% — with a spike of 2.4% in 2018, but since the end of 2020 as pandemic restrictions have lessened the annual rate has grown exponentially.

Shoshone County was able to stay relatively in step with their COLA as those rates fluctuated, but in 2021 when the rate spiked from 1.2% to 4.7% it became a game of numerical chess in how they would compensate their employees properly without egregious tax increases.

The 7% increase last year still didn’t entirely catch them up with 2022’s 8% annual rate of inflation — and as of this writing, the average is currently sitting at 3% and is in the midst of a downward trend since June 2022’s record high of 9.1%.

That downward trend is good news for everyone, and in this case, particularly the employees who will have to stretch their dollars further even after receiving a raise in their wages and salaries.

“I definitely don’t think we’re overpaying our county employees, but we have to be respectful to the taxpayers as well,” Zimmerman said.

Discussions also shifted to the topic of leveling the pay scale across the board for county employees, but in order to do that the county would have to conduct a formal wage study, which, Casady explained to fellow board members, was something that the previous board had planned to do, but was unable to accomplish.

One of the key issues the board sees is that oftentimes the immediate comparison between wages and payscales for Shoshone County is Kootenai County.

And because the two are truly incomparable in terms of population and tax base, those comparisons are unreasonable for a county the size of Shoshone. But, there are other counties in the region that could be used for comparison and determining a new scale and that’s what he would like to explore.

“We need to step back and rethink all of this on how we’re going to do it.” Zimmerman said. “We’re not Kootenai County, but we’ve got like-sized counties that we can use to determine our payroll. We need a county-wide pay matrix.”

While the BOCC did elect to reduce the COLA, they also made the decision that they would not change the insurance for the county employees, despite a 9% increase in costs for the county.

All inflation statistics in this story came from the U.S. Labor Department.