FAYETTEVILLE : UA puts original pay plan into gear
Posted on Saturday, May 17, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/225940/
University of Arkansas officials announced Friday they will advance their original plan to recommend a combination of cost-of-living and merit raises for classified employees. Officials with UA and the state said they were able to clear up a misunderstanding that led the university to ditch the plan Tuesday in favor of a backup plan. Setting proposed salary increases is an early stage of crafting the university’s budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1. The UA board of trustees will consider the proposed budget June 6.
“We’ve been working on it this whole week,” UA’s chancellor-elect, G. David Gearhart, said in an interview. “But the bottom line is, it’s back to where it was — and that’s a good thing.”
The Fayetteville campus announced the original plan May 7, calling for 2 percent cost-ofliving raises for all classified workers and the possibility of merit raises for those workers from a pool totaling 1 percent of their combined salaries.
Then it announced Tuesday it had changed the proposal to one that set aside a 3 percent pool of merit-raise money for the classified workers, saying the state’s Office of Personnel Management had not approved the first plan.
“They never got a reply from us,” said Tim Leathers, deputy director of the state Department of Finance and Administration, which oversees the personnel management workers. “I think it was just a misunderstanding of the question being asked and what they were expecting.”
But Friday, the state told UA that while it approves plans the university uses for performance evaluations, it doesn’t have authority to tell it how to allocate its budget in that area, Leathers said.
In an announcement Friday, the university said it made the Tuesday decision “in anticipation that the proposal would not be approved by the state in time for the university to develop a budget proposal.”
Paul Bixby, chairman of UA’s Staff Senate, said that, as a systems analyst in UA’s Information Technology Services office, he knows how harried the budget architects have been.
“We’re in a crunch,” he said. “In the last 24 hours, the communication breakdown has been corrected.”
The Staff Senate is pleased UA returned to square one, because both kinds of raises are important for keeping and rewarding employees, Bixby said.
“We thought the original plan was an excellent plan given the budget constraints we were up against,” he said.