Published on Dec. 17, 2018	In the Columbia Missourian
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The city needs to change the pay scale and benefits plan for utilities employees in order to better retain and hire experienced lineworkers and technicians, a group of retired electrical utility workers argued in a report released Monday.

The group, Retired Employees of the Columbia Electric Utility, is composed of five members with a combined 168 years of experience working for the utility system, according to the report. Two former superintendents, a retired manager, a retired foreman and a retired assistant director make up the group.

The “mass exodus” of experienced electric linemen has left Columbia’s electric utility system with workers who are “dangerously undertrained,” according to previous Missourian reporting. Inadequate pay has been the number one reason for departure since 2008. The city has had to contract out up to 20 percent of Columbia’s electrical work since 2015.

The city is authorized to have 47 staff members and three superintendents who are collectively charged with building and maintaining Columbia’s electrical systems, according to the report. The city’s electrical utility department currently has 35 staff members, 24 who have the requisite experience to work unsupervised, the report says. Five trained staff members are currently eligible for retirement.

Jim Windsor, a 36-year veteran of City of Columbia Utilities and retired assistant director of utilities, spoke to the council Monday about his concerns. The city should act to “remedy a spiral of neglect,” he said.

He first brought the issue to the council in June.

“Nothing has been done to address the issues we brought forth,” he said.

Windsor spoke out as a paying customer as well as someone who understood the nature of the work.

“I’m concerned about the employees that are still there,” he told the Missourian after commenting. “It’s an extremely dangerous job.”

The collective lack of experience, ever-shrinking staff numbers and an inability to hire experienced employees because of a lack of competitive pay is damaging the city’s ability to do routine maintenance, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in added costs for contracted labor and resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment sitting unused, the report says.

According to figures presented in the document, the total hourly cost for equipment and personnel when city employees are doing the work — about $250 an hour — is far lower than what it costs to use contractors, who cost the city over $600 an hour.

Lack of skilled labor is directly affecting consumers, too; because inexperienced technicians are not allowed to work on “hot” lines, the city is subject to more maintenance outages.

The department’s training program entails a four-year apprenticeship for line workers who then become journeymen, according to the report. After five more years, it says, those linemen can supervise apprentices.

For several years, the report says, the electric utility department’s system of internal promotion and training served the city well, with competitive wages and benefits. That changed when other cities began to outpace Columbia in wages and benefits, the report said.

The low pay, Windsor argued, is sapping skill. “It’s really going in the wrong direction in terms of motivating people and getting effective work out of them,” he said.

Now, he said, the city can’t take on new apprentices, because there are too few skilled employees eligible to train them.

Currently, Columbia targets wages at 50 percent of the competitive market rate, according to the report, meaning that half of competitive market wages sit above what Columbia pays its linemen. The starting salary for linemen is currently a little under $31 an hour, according to the report.Other Missouri utility companies pay linemen far more, the document says: Independence’s pays more than $49 an hour and the Boone Electric Cooperative, located in Columbia, pays almost $40 an hour.

To remedy hiring and retention issues, the group recommended raising the starting pay to a competitive rate, about $38 an hour. Existing employees who are paid more than the minimum wage would be moved above the new starting salary to a figure that accounted for the existing difference between their wages and the starting rate.They also recommended hiking foremen’s minimum wages by 10 percent and setting the superintendent wage range to be 10 percent higher than foremen’s wages.

To better incentivize effective work, the group argued that the utility department should end a policy that currently moves wages for employees to the midpoint of their role’s wage range — a benefit linemen never received, as their starting salary is pinned to the midpoint of competitive market rates already — and should reinstitute merit raises for good work.

“You can get a lot more done with a few high-performance people than a lot of low-performance people,” Windsor said.

Finally, the group recommended allowing department heads to determine the appropriate salaries for recruits, as opposed to the Human Resources Department, and reinstituting a more generous benefits system that allowed for staff members to receive a pension after their age and years working for the department added up to 80.

Currently, the minimum age to receive a pension upon retirement is 60.

The city council voted in September to raise the wages of permanent city employees by increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour, giving all permanent city employees a 45-cent raise, giving trash collectors an additional $2 an hour, increasing pay grade maximums and moving all eligible employees up to the midpoints of their pay scales.

The raises cost the city more than $3 million, with two-thirds of the cost coming from department cuts, according to the report. Linemen only received the 45-cent raise.Windsor also worried about how quickly the city would be able to recover from emergency weather events.

“We have half of the staff we need,” he said. “We’re putting ourselves at risk unnecessarily.”

He said that residents should consider installing natural gas generators if the problem remains much longer. “I don’t think we’re far from that — if we lose more people, the system may start to deteriorate,” he said.

Windsor noted that while it’s possible for the city to call in other utility crews from areas they’ve signed agreements with, it would probably cost more than using city employees.

“Do we want to pay a competitive rate to employees so that we can properly staff our crews,” he asked, “or do we want to wait for something to happen that would cost an exorbitant amount in labor?”