Guest Post: Hire Higher

Why not, it's not the School Board's money?

- Naked Conch - Posted by Larry Murray - September 18, 2012
Editor's Note:  Larry Murray nails this one home.  Hey, It's great we're not hiring entrenched Bubbas at the School District, but do we really need to pay hay day wages to a new employee without testing the market with more reasonable compensation.  Also, Larry is as brevity challenged as yours truly, but hey, we're not paying for print media and killing trees, so think of it as saving natural resources!

The School District has hired a new Purchasing Agent.  That, indeed, is good news as the position has been vacant for several months.
          Not only has the District hired a new Purchasing Agent, it has hired an experienced one, taking someone previously with the Sheriff’s Department.  There will be no need for training, no learning curve to get up to speed.  Coming from the Sheriff’s Department, the new hire arrives with both general experience and a knowledge of governmental purchasing, a decided asset.  I look forward to good things coming in the purchasing area.

          I am told that the new Purchasing Agent responded to an employment ad in The Citizen, something the District does not ordinarily do.  Kudos!  By reaching out beyond the website, the District was able to hire a highly competent individual.  I hope that is a harbinger of things to come.  In today’s job market, the District should have no difficulty attracting competent candidates for all openings.  But, that can only be achieved if the District continues to cast a wide net, advertising broadly.
          The previous Purchasing Agent, a disaster by any standard, was a classic example of what you get by limiting awareness of job openings and focusing on internal hiring and promotion.  It is what I call the Monique Acevedo Syndrome.  You hire a local, a Conch or Bubba, as a secretary and you promote and promote until she is well beyond her level of competence.  It is the Peter Principle run amok.  As a friend used to say: “A mediocre employee working at full speed is still mediocre.”
          The last Purchasing Agent had the good sense to resign in disgrace after mismanaging RFP’s for Banking Services and Outsourcing Food Services, not to mention less egregious errors.  This is the same person who failed to bill Medicaid for months on end until the District amassed more than $750,000 in unreimbursed expenses.  But, I would suggest, that is what you get when you limit the applicant pool and engage in promotion by personal relationship.
          Having done all of this great work in employing a stellar Purchasing Agent, the school District still managed to mangle the process.  The good news is offset by bad news.
          The new hire came from the Sheriff’s Office where she was making $41,722 per year.  If you read the “Duties” outlined on her application, she worked hard, covered a lot of territory and was vested with considerable responsibility.  The Sheriff deemed those duties worth a salary of $41,722 which represented a 5% increase over the previous year.
          The School District was so pleased with this new recruit that they nearly doubled her salary to $70,547.  She must have though she had died and gone to heaven!  Who would turn down a 70%+ salary increase?  I know that I would not.
          Why did the School District offer such a tremendous salary increase for doing pretty much the same thing that she did for the Sheriff?  Was it because she was the greatest Purchasing Agent since Thomas Jefferson negotiated with Napoleon for Louisiana?  Was it because the candidate was demanding a monumental raise in very lean times?

          No, the new Purchasing Agent was paid $70,547 because that is what the District offered.  With no regard for comparability with either the private or public sectors, the District set a salary that any reasonable person would consider outrageous.  Then why did the District do it?
          The District had to pay $70,547 to a new Purchasing Agent because that salary was akin to that of the predecessor.  Reducing the salary would expose the District to charges that it had previously been overpaying.  And, such charges had been leveled.  The Key West Chamber of Commerce, in its last wage survey, has pointed to the salary paid to the District Purchasing Agent as one that had no foundation in reality and was clearly out of sync with both the public and private sectors.  Despite confirming with the new hire the veracity of the Chamber’s concern, the District forged on, hoping, I guess, that no one would notice or care.
          But, I contend, there is a more important reason for the District continuing to pay a Purchasing Agent $70,000 regardless of competing factors in the marketplace.  To reduce the new hire’s salary to say $45,000, a hefty 10% raise, would expose the dozens and dozens of other salaries well beyond the norm.  After all, the District is the land of $50,000 per year secretaries with 30% benefit packages.
          A Purchasing Agent paid only $45,000 per year would stand out like a sore thumb.  How can you justify paying a skilled, experienced professional with a college degree less than a secretary?  The bloated salary structure has to be maintained at all costs, pun intended.  As I said, the new Purchasing Agent must think she has died and gone to heaven.  Good for her, bad for taxpayers.
          At the budget hearings for the Mosquito Control District, recently appointed Board member Phil Goodman argued for reducing employee salaries.  “Our compensation is over the top,” Goodman said.  “We need to bring value to the taxpayer.”  (Emphasis added)  Apparently that belief, value to the taxpayer, is not shared by the School Board.
          The School Board Chairman has repeatedly exclaimed that Monroe County must have the highest paid teachers in the state.  And, he has punctuated that statement with the cry that we must have the highest paid administrators.  It seems that he has succeeded on both counts, in spades.
          The Board Chairman has railed for years about the overabundance of administrators in the School District and has succeeded admirably in reducing those numbers.  Apparently, the economy minded Chairman could care less, however, about what the remaining administrators are paid.  Presented with a singular opportunity, a new Purchasing Agent, to make a point and to begin rolling back a hyper inflated salary structure, the Chairman and the rest of the Board have sat moot, as they usually do.
          The taxpayers are being ripped off and nobody cares.  There is no way that the School District will ever extricate itself from a continuing financial crisis with a budget that is 70% to 80% salaries if it does not begin to make some hard decisions as to what it pays.