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John “Jack” Helin
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TAB 5
Gonzales said comparing Shawnee with the Basehors and Tonganoxies of the world was a bit
“silly.”
In addition to employing nearly 10 times as many employees as the smaller towns, Shawnee pays
a higher percentage of its employees higher wages. For example, 11 of its employees are paid at
a rate equivalent to more than $100,000 per year; the four smaller towns examined for this story
combined for one such employee. Gonzales noted that Shawnee has employees performing tasks
that smaller towns may outsource to contractors, including more highly paid specialties such as
engineering or information technology.
McCommon, who took over as city administrator in Tonganoxie this spring, said employee pay
has not been a major issue since he began, and the City Council has seemed pleased with a pay
plan established about four years ago that includes regular merit-based increases. Although he
hasn’t had the benefit of conducting a formal wage survey, McCommon said he believed
Tonganoxie’s pay was in line with its competitors. “We’re not great, but we’re not awful either,”
McCommon said. “We’re kind of in the middle.” Of the cities surveyed by the Chieftain /
Sentinel, Tonganoxie had the fewest employees being paid at a rate equivalent to $70,000 per
year or more: just one, the city administrator.
In Bonner Springs, the City Council this summer approved employees’ first substantial pay raise
in several years, since the economic downturn led to belt-tightening. A 4 percent increase for all
employees will go into effect in 2013. “We’ve basically had to freeze our budgets” in recent
years, said Bonner Springs City Manager John Helin. The city, however, was able to weather
the past few years without more severe measures such as layoffs or furloughs, Helin noted, and
the wage limits hadn’t hurt the city’s hiring efforts.
McCommon said the stability is often what attracts people to municipal work. “For a lot of
people, a steady check is something dependable that they can easily plan for, and it feels better
for them,” he said, “so they opt to work for local governments.”
Shawnee, too, has been able to make some wide-scale wage increases for the first time in several
years. In March 2013, all full-time employees will get at least a 2 percent raise — the first
increase some of them will have received since 2009, Gonzales said. “Every budget year’s
different,” Gonzales said, “and certainly these last few years have been more different than any
of the ones I’ve seen in my career.” After Chris Lowe took over as city administrator in Baldwin
City last fall, he noticed a deficiency not in wages, but in benefits. The city offered $500 per
month toward health insurance for employees, he said, but nothing toward insurance for their
spouses or children. The city approved a change for 2013, he said, shifting to a 65 percent
contribution for families. “We were limiting ourselves,” Lowe said. He said he worried that the
city would limit any job applicants to people who had no need to provide health insurance for a
family.
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