2025-09-24 Salary Commission Minutes

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Salary Commission September 24, 2025 Is it possible to ask a random question because I’m ignorant— CHR. PAVAO: Okay. MR. TODD: Yeah—why don’t we negotiate individual director salaries within a range? And I bring this up because I get constant offers to come and apply as a Fire Chief across the United States. And your issue with, like, engineering degrees or other things—we put them in there because the salary’s set, so we want to make sure they have a certain level of qualification. But in a lot of organiza—for a lot of governments—local governments, state governments, and whatever—what they do is they just have a salary range and what they say is, “These are the qualities we’re looking for, but they’re not required”—and they offer a range that’s large enough that they’re going to get good candidates. And then after they found the one they want, then they sit down and there’s a whole negotiation process that, I assume, would be run by, like, HR and the mayor’s office, if they’re appointed by the mayor or the commissions—if they’re appointed by commissions. I bring this up ‘cause in my pocket I actually have a flier for some organization out there that’s looking for a fire chief in Vancouver and they’re offering between 170,000.00 and 297,000.00— and it’s a huge range, but they don’t actually have—they have some general things—we want you to have been in a leadership position, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah—but the range is big enough that you’re going to have interest and what you’ll end up is with people with all kinds of qualifications that you really want to hire. And then, it’s about, kind of, negotiating. And I’m assuming the laws in our current system don’t allow for that, but a part of me says that maybe, as we move forward in the next decade or something like that—it might be a way for us to attract top talent but also be competitive and make sure we don’t run into these inversion issues and things like that. MS. NAMAHOE: Hi, Commissioner Namahoe. Thank you for bringing up several issues just now, that I think came to our attention when we convened back in 2022-2023. At that time, none of the leadership had received a raise since January 2018. The way the Charter is written, the Salary Commission has to address all of that. Having also sat, previously, on the Fire Commission—that was not a bargaining chip we had. Having sat on the MAB, that was not a bargaining chip we had when we hired HRD. So, I think that you bring up a wonderful point, but that’s going to be the Charter Commission that convenes what—every decade—to address. And we’ve never tightened that up. So, this Commission—this body did not have quorum until that year, and the inflationary adjustments was to address the appreciation for the middling leadership that kept doing their job at fantastic and phenomenal levels—‘cause remember, what did we have in 2018? We had lava flows, we were still dealing with the aftermath of Iselle, we had fires, we had random little germs that we had to suppress, before we had other pandemics outside of COVID. Page 11