Budgeted Compensation for different City of Sioux Falls departments
l3wis Notice who has the highest averages and who has the lowest? No wonder the city struggles with hiring seasonal workers.
This information was supplied and compiled by Mike Zitterich
Employment
The $15 an hour Minimum Wage is a Joke!
While some may be surprised that I do not support it, it is for other reasons. It should be $18-20 an hour and it should take affect within two years with four 6-month steps. There should also be an automatic inflationary COLA every year.
If they pass a Federal $15 an hour minimum wage, it won’t take fully affect until 2025. What’s the point?!
There is also a lot of misinformation out there about how this will kill businesses and cause mass unemployment. Not the case, when states have raised their minimum wages they did see an initial hike in unemployment, but in low wage jobs, after a year they actually saw economic growth and the GDP in the state rising. Believe it or not, when you pay people more, they spend more, and it helps the economy. What an amazing concept!
You also need to understand that this only affects large businesses who participate in interstate and international commerce. Like Walmart or Amazon. Ma an Pa’s Ice Cream Parlor in Bumf’ck Indiana won’t have to pay those wages.
And now for the obvious reasons this is the right thing to do. The large corporations who can afford an $18 an hour minimum wage, CAN AFFORD THE WAGE. They make Billions while paying very little Federal income taxes then turnaround and expect the very taxpayers who do pay their taxes (us) to subsidize their low-wage workers in the form of Medicade, SNAP and and housing. It was once estimated that because of the low wages Walmart pays its workers, EACH store costs taxpayers $1 million a year in worker subsidies. Why not just pay workers a living wage?
The upside is a boon in economic growth because instead of the top 1% sitting on all the wealth in our country, the workers would be spending it!
I guess I have never understood the argument that we need to starve workers while the top 1% sit on loads of money they will never be able to spend. It’s NOT a socialistic concept, it’s just good economics.
City of Sioux Falls 2021 Salaries
I just started digging into this, but here are my first impressions.
Once again the highest paid city employee, the head doc over at Falls Community Health (where you currently can’t receive a Covid vaccination) received a $10,000.00 a year raise. She now makes around $256K. I guess I shouldn’t complain, she got more last year with a $18,000.00 raise.
But what is more interesting is how a 3 year employee has garnered a $13,624.00 raise over two years. Shawn Pritchett the finance director was making $166,316.00 when hired, the following year (2020) he was making $171,940.00 and now is getting paid $179,940.00.
Don’t get me wrong, it is an important position, but first off what did he do to deserve this kind of raise, and secondly, while he is the chief accountant for the city he has 29 minions working for him. He isn’t an accountant, he’s a manager and he should get manager pay.
One of my conservative friends said it best to me awhile back and again today when we were discussing this topic, “No one should make more than the mayor.” Mayor TenHaken’s current pay as chief administrator and manager of the city and employees is $130K a year. Think about that.
There was also this little change up. TenHaken eliminated the GIS department and now is calling them the Civic Analytics department;
The manager got a $5k raise and one of her minions got a $4K raise. But why the name change? And what are they doing?
What amazes me the most is that in the middle of an economic downturn in which the city lost tax revenue last year we would be giving these enormous raises while the average city employee got a whopping 1% raise.
City of Sioux Falls hires wanted criminal
Trust me, after reading about all the BS going on in our state yesterday it would be easy to miss this;
Minnehaha County Sheriff’s Office has issued a news release concerning the arrest of 35-year-old Josheua King for a warrant issued by Sand Bernadino County, California:
On 02/17/2021, the Sioux Falls Area Fugitive Task Force arrested Josheua Alan King, 35 years old, on an arrest warrant issued by San Bernardino County, California in 2018 for the following offenses:
4 counts of Lewd and Lascivious Acts with a Minor
1 count of Lewd and Lascivious Acts with a Child of 14 or 15yrs of ageJosheua King was arrested at the Midco Aquatic Center in Sioux Falls where he was a part time employee. Prior to his arrest, Mr. King was also employed at Sanford Hospital in Sioux Falls.
Ok, a couple of things to unpack here. Does the city do a criminal background check before hiring people to work around our youth? Heck, even a simple criminal background check would have told us he had a warrant out for his arrest, for around 2 years. If you search the city salaries, Mr. King is listed in the 2021 wages report as making $14 an hour as Midco Maintenance, in the 2020 wages report he is NOT listed, so that tells us he was hired last year something long AFTER the warrant was issued.
Thank goodness the SFPD apparently got a tip hopefully before he committed any crimes at the MIDCO.
I can’t speak for the hospital he was employed at, they are a private entity, but I am concerned they didn’t check his background either.
What is also disheartening wasn’t like he had a previous record that he was already convicted on and time served, he had an ACTIVE WARRANT!
I will be honest with you that I have never had a lot of confidence in our HR department, they have 4 people in the office that make over six-figures yet they don’t do simple background checks!? There needs to be a full outside investigation on how something like this happens. The council, while normally doesn’t get involved in the Mayor’s business, when the mayor and his administration does NOT do their jobs they need to intervene. If I was them I would pass a resolution to audit the HR department.
If I were a parent of young children that took my kids to the MIDCO I would be outraged. We need to get to the bottom of this before something like this happens again.
Folks, these are the things that happen when we don’t have open and transparent government! Apparently it is so bad they are even hiding things internally. WOW!
Will Amazon actually drive wages down?
Remember the promise of the economic impact we were promised from the Events Center? It has actually been a drain on taxpayers and most of the profits made at the facility go straight out of town to the performers and promoters.
A Bloomberg analysis of government labor statistics reveals that in community after community where Amazon sets up shop, warehouse wages tend to fall.  In 68 counties where Amazon has opened one of its largest facilities, average industry compensation slips by more than 6% during the facility’s first two years, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In many cases, Amazon quickly becomes the largest logistics player in these counties, so its size and lower pay likely pull down the average. Among economists, there’s a debate about whether the company is creating a kind of monopsony, where there’s only one buyer—or in this case one employer.
While Amazon’s arrival coincides with rising pay in some southern and low-wage precincts, the opposite is true in wealthier parts of the country, including the northeast and Midwest. Six years ago, before the company opened a giant fulfillment center in Robbinsville, New Jersey, warehouse workers made $24 an hour on average, according to BLS data. Last year the average hourly wage slipped to $17.50.
I have warned people that once Amazon opens it’s warehouse in Sioux Falls you will see the job market turn upside down, overnight. We should be careful what we wish for.