Pay Raises Draw Fire, Ire

Under fire from the City Council, Oceanside’s interim city manager has canceled pay raises for his department chiefs.

Council members said they were stunned that James Turner planned to increase the pay of nine department heads less than a month after the city was forced to lay off more than 20 workers and demote others to help balance the budget.

“I think he misread the signals from the council, very apparently,” Mayor Larry Bagley said Thursday.

“While most of those raises were probably merited,” he said, “we have been firing people and demoting people who were just as deserving.”

“He just wholesale gave his employees the maximum they could get,” said Councilman Sam Williamson Sr., who with Councilwoman Nancy York serves on the council’s budget committee. “He should know better than that.”

Turner said Thursday that he was surprised by the reaction from the council. He said he was only attempting to give the department chiefs the same merit step increases due all other city employees.

The step pay raises, based on merit and time on the job, would have averaged about 4.5%, he said.

“There’s been no council policy to eliminate step increases at this point,” said Turner. “I think the problem is the council and I were apparently not communicating.”

Williamson said that, during budget committee meetings earlier this year, “we told him there are no raises . . . unless it’s an exceptional individual (and) the cuts are supposed to come from the top (management), not from the bottom. For some reason Jim (Turner) can’t get that through his head.”

Turner said he has rescinded the raises for department heads until he can meet with Williamson and York on Monday, and “we can get an understanding of what they want to do.”

“If they want to set some different policy, I need to know,” he said.

Besides the department heads, there are 36 other middle-management employees, police officers and general employees eligible for the step pay raises this month, Turner said.

He said he is contacting department heads to see if they can hold off on those pay raises until a new council policy is worked out. In some cases, the pay raises may have already been granted.

The top managers in city government have already had their pay cut an average of 10% to 11% this year, said Turner. The cuts came through council-ordered reductions in contributions to retirement programs and the elimination of automobile allowances.