Thousand Oaks Considers Raising Salary Brackets : Pay: The city may increase the earning potential of key managers by 10.7% to stay in line with similar governments.

Salary brackets for some top Thousand Oaks officials would shift upward by as much as 10.7%, under a compensation adjustment proposal the City Council will consider tonight.

While individual paychecks would not be affected until at least next summer, key employees’ potential earnings could skyrocket if the council approves the reclassification.

The top salary for the director of library services, for example, would jump to $104,112 a year, up from the $94,044 set as the maximum salary two years ago. And the directors of the finance, planning and public works departments would see their upper earning potential raised by more than 8%, to a maximum $111,888 annually.

Big boosts in earning potential would also be awarded to the human resources manager and assistant city manager, who would see their brackets move upward at least 5.5%. In contrast, the city manager’s top potential wage would inch higher by less than 1%.

Within each salary bracket, employees traditionally climb a ladder from the low end of the scale to the maximum salary, based on their experience and performance evaluations.

But they are not guaranteed to stay on the same rung of the ladder if their salary bracket slides. So a manager standing on the third of five rungs, for example, could be technically demoted to the second rung in order to maintain the same annual wage if the bracket parameters suddenly jump up.

“The potential (for salary hikes) could be out there . . . but there’s no guarantee, and there’s not even an expectation,” Finance Director Robert Biery said. Just because the wage brackets slide upward, he said, “it would have nothing to do with where any one manager ends up.”

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Still, the thought of boosting even potential earnings made some council members nervous.

“I do not think the whole ladder should move up for upper management,” Councilwoman Jaime Zukowski said. “Certainly this is not the time for those kind of increases. They would be very difficult to justify.”

Zukowski said she still had not decided whether to support bracket adjustments for lower-level employees.

Under the proposal, a street maintenance supervisor, for example, could see a nearly 5% increase to $55,728. But other brackets, such as librarians and the deputy city clerk, would receive negligible adjustments.

All the changes, both the major and the minute, are designed to bring Thousand Oaks’ pay scale in line with comparable cities, such as Camarillo, Irvine, Pasadena and Torrance, officials said.

If adopted, the proposal would cost the city about $300,000 a year, said Greg Eckman, the city’s human resources manager. The exact figure would be determined only after next summer’s performance evaluations when each employee could get a raise based on merit and the new pay scale.

“We are assessing what the same job is paying at comparable cities in Southern California because we need to keep up to date with our competition,” Councilman Frank Schillo said. “We need to keep the people we want (with good salaries) so they don’t slide sideways to other cities.”

But taxpayer advocate H. Jere Robings, who has sharply criticized public officials’ perks and salaries in the past, objected to any analysis that adjusted Thousand Oaks’ wages based on other cities’ pay scales.

“Unfortunately, whether it’s the Police Department or the Fire Department or city staff, their salaries all run in this upward spiral because they compare themselves with other locales,” Robings said. “If Thousand Oaks raises their (brackets), then the next city is going to say ‘Gee, we gotta bring ours in line with Thousand Oaks,’ and it goes on and on.”

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Because pay increases are based on merit, with no automatic cost-of-living increase, no employee would be guaranteed a raise. Generally, the benchmark for merit raises hovers around 3% to 4%, and even exceptional employees rarely receive more than 6% in any one year.

But an employee’s higher bracket could factor into greater pay hikes during the next round of performance evaluations, scheduled for next July, said Jeff Knowles, president of the Thousand Oaks Management Assn. labor union, which represents about 80 city supervisors.