A miscalculation of employee compensation to the tune of about $1 million in the 2024-25 Sampson County budget was broached during Monday night’s Sampson County Board of Commissioner’s meeting, more than a month after the board’s approval of the fiscal plan.

It was a walk-on item added to the agenda at the beginning of the meeting. County manager Ed Causey told commissioner the agenda item would be about the $747,000 that was allocated in the budget for helping employees get to what he called “the midpoint.”

The midpoint, Sampson County Finance Officer David Clack explained, is the middle number between the minimum and maximum pay for each employee, a benchmark the county tries to move employees to after 10 years of work.

“The midpoint is what we’ve always tried to get employees to within 10 years, even though we haven’t been successful most of the time with that,” said Clack. “We haven’t had the money to do it.”

And even though there was a budget allocation to bring employees up to midpoint this year, Clack told the board the county did not allocate enough due to a miscalculation of around $1 million.

“The budget ordinance in section 12 — where it talks about moving people to midpoint — says that anyone who has been in their position for 10 or more years will move to midpoint. Just whatever it takes to get them to midpoint, that’s where they’ll go,” Clack began. “Going back and reviewing that and doing the numbers on that, we have found that would cost the county not $747,000, but about $1.7 million — about a million more dollars than what we have budgeted.”

Clack told the board that the calculation did not include anybody jumping straight to the midpoint, and that if employees did get there it was because they were “very, very close to start with.”

He stated that the board was going to have to change section 12 of the budget ordinance to include whatever it was that the board wanted — whether that was keeping it at $747,000 and having them be impartial and fair about who was getting a pay raise, or allocating more funds to it.

As part of the 2024-25 budget, the board approved a 1.5 percent cost of living adjustment — a cost of $265,574 — and allocated $747,700 to assist employees in reaching the midpoint of their salary scale.

Effective July 1, 2024, employee salaries were to be evaluated to determine the difference between employee salary and midpoint of the assigned pay grade as well as their time in the pay grade. The amount of difference, according to the budget, will be divided by the number of years remaining to reach 10 years in the pay grade. According to the budget, each employee will then receive that amount as an annual contingent upon a satisfactory performance evaluation, allowing staffers to realize incremental pay raises and a greater reward for longevity.

Clack said that the calculation they created was making the pay differences between employees worse because it did not reflect their experience, skills or responsibilities.

“What we did made our (pay) compressions worse instead of better,” said Clack . “Our pay plan went a long way toward making it better. Our calculation took a step back, which is not what we intended to do. So, we’d like to go back to the drawing board and how to distribute that $747,000, unless the board wants to allocate more to it.”

“In my opinion I think we need to instruct the staff to make it work within the confines of what we originally budgeted,” Chairman Jerol Kivett said.

The board was in agreement, and the motion to keep the allocation at $747,000 was passed unanimously.

You can reach Alyssa Bergey at 910-249-4617. Follow us on Twitter at @SamsponInd, like us on Facebook, and check out our Instagram at @thesampsonindependent.