At the request of Park Commissioner Jim Heberer at the March board meeting, the Kewanee Park Board, at its June meeting, finally put the issue of the park district’s wage cap policy to rest.
The board passed a resolution that will set the wage range for full-time-exempt employees at plus or minus $7,500 of the current rate of pay. But the pay won’t be contingent on the wage range previously set by the board, but instead will be determined by the board’s latest action on individual salaries and compensation. That number can be used by the board for determining pay for raises or new hires, said Andrew Dwyer, executive director of the parks.
For full-time and part-time non-exempt employees, the “high end of wage range is determined by the most recent board action regarding the highest paid employee in that position at time of increase or setting of rate of pay and minimum wage is the low end of range,” the resolution reads.
“Each employee is looked at as an individual,” said Dwyer, and the resolution gives a wide berth to the board when giving raises or offering compensation to new employees to fill vacated positions.
The resolution essentially negates the wage caps passed by the board several years ago. Back before the former director, Brian Johnson, announced his retirement in 2021, the board passed a formal pay scale for park positions, capping the salary of the park director at $70,000; the maintenance supervisor at $55,000; the golf course superintendent at $65,000, and the assistant golf superintendent at $35,000.
Since then, several of those job titles and duties have been changed, and the salaries of those current, comparable positions are higher than the wage caps.
At the March board meeting, Commissioner Heberer told the board that the current salary of the new director violated the board’s own policy.
“We set limits on positions,” Heberer said in March, and according to the Commissioner the board was operating in violation of those wage caps and had been doing so since Dwyer was hired. “I know yours was $70,000,” the commissioner told Dwyer, referring to the cap placed on the park director’s position.
Heberer urged the board to amend the wage cap. “We don’t want to be in any more violation or misunderstanding,” he said.
Dwyer has received two raises from the board since he was hired to replace Johnson. His current salary is around $77,000 a year, well over the wage cap.
Dwyer said the latest resolution passed by the board supersedes the wage cap.
Moving forward, salaries and raises will be set by the board based on qualifications, performance, and economic factors when determining compensation increases for staff.
When someone is hired in or given a raise, the board will have the latitude to raise or lower the salary or hourly wage based on factors such as experience and length of employment. Dwyer said the new policy is less arbitrary.
“They’ve adopted a meaningful new policy in replacement of that,” Dwyer said. “They updated it to have more of a moving target.”
