Novato increases pay ranges for key vacant posts
The City Council has approved higher salaries for three positions that have remained unfilled for extended periods.
The positions are director of public works, which has been vacant since November; deputy director of public works, vacant since January 2024; and chief building official, vacant since May 2023. Consultants and retired staff have been picking up the slack in the interim, according to a report by Eva Hilliard, the city’s employment director.
“These positions have been difficult to fill due to less-than competitive salaries as compared to other public agencies seeking to fill similar positions, and limited availability of skilled and talented candidates for these roles,” she wrote.
Hilliard added: “For the past several years, employee retention has been a chronic challenge to the efficient operation of the City. Over 100% of the employee workforce has turned over in the past 10 years — that doesn’t include retirees, just resignations and other departures. Our valued employees choose to go to other agencies where they are competitively compensated and have manageable workloads.”
Prior recruitment efforts for the deputy director and building official failed to draw “viable” candidates, she wrote.
Hilliard said the cost of the increases will not exceed $47,635. The updated annual salary range is $186,496.75 to $226,687.76 for public works director; $163,345.52 to $198,547.65 for deputy director; and $143,352.98 to $174,246.38 for chief building official.
The council adopted a resolution on the salary increases at its meeting on Tuesday.
Mayor Tim O’Connor said the city has been struggling with turnover for more than a decade, in part because of an inability to pay salaries that are competitive for the market. He said the passage last year of Measure M, which increased the sales tax rate from 8.5% to 9.25%, put the city “in a financial position to begin addressing the most pressing needs.”
“While we wish we could address everything, that is beyond our resources, so adopting a strategic approach to these decisions is critical,” he said. “These three positions are a part of that larger strategy. They have been vacant for a considerable time over the last few years and making relatively minor adjustments to their salary scales should help Novato attract and retain top level talent to those positions which in turn will enable the city to move forward with essential work in public works and community development.”
Jana Blunt, the union representative for the largest group of Novato employees, praised Hilliard’s report as “direct, explicit and realistic.” Her organization, Service Employees International Union Local 1021, negotiates for about 80 city employees at the lower end of the pay scale, such as maintenance workers, administrative aides and recreation staff.
“We just hope the City Council and their representatives at the bargaining table value our frontline workers in the same light,” Blunt said. “The Novato staffing crisis indeed goes all the way to the top, but it started at the bottom many years ago.”
“This isn’t the first special wage increase the City Council has enacted,” she said. “In March of 2022, the council unanimously approved a 1.5% pay raise for police officers, managers, dispatchers and community service officers. This was in addition to annual increases they’d already secured. In both of these cases the raises were extremely overdue, but offering them to select employees when the entire workforce is experiencing a crisis is shortsighted and inequitable.”