I left this past Monday’s Commission meeting feeling something I did not expect to feel when I first entered the Courthouse that evening – depressed.  A meeting that started out feeling hopeful and optimistic at the beginning by the end had descended into the same feeling of anger and discontent that has marked pretty much every meeting for at least the last two years, all due to the mother of all political hot potatoes – pay raises. 
In my experience, City and County Commissioners really don’t like talking about or dealing with pay raises. It’s a subject that makes politicians squirm, because it inevitably makes people mad, and people whose top priority is re-election don’t want to make anyone mad.  This of course inevitably leads them to making LOTS of people mad and hurting their chances of re-election, but that’s another topic for another time.

First a little primer – every year Kansas County Commissioners vote on a salary schedule for the new year.  Some do it as a resolution, others as a regular vote, but they all do it….well, everyone except Bourbon County, I’ve discovered.  Up until this past Monday night, the Bourbon County Commission hasn’t passed a Salary Schedule since August of 2021.  This didn’t really surprise me – pay raises are something many local politicians have played kick the can with for many years in this area, and I suspect we’re not alone.  That said, not voting on a salary schedule is a violation of state statute, and does get flagged in audits.

Further complicating things is the issue of job responsibilities.  Kansas state law has specific responsibilities set in stone for certain elected offices like Treasurer and Clerk, but in almost all cases those holding those offices are given several responsibilities that they are not statutorily required to do.  A good example is Human Resources – most counties I spoke to over the last week have the County Clerk’s office handle Human Resources.  A few, like Cherokee, have an actual HR Director.  Another sort of obscure one I learned about when running for County Clerk in 2020 is Road Records.  Bourbon County (and I imagine many other counties like ours) have TONS of paper road records that need to be digitized and organized, on top of keeping current records of roads.  Several years ago this responsibility went from the Clerk’s office to the Register of Deeds office here in Bourbon County, but as you can imagine, it’s a pretty time intensive job for a busy office of only three people.  These responsibilities more often than not come with no extreme compensation or manpower even if they are time and labor intensive. 

In some cases, elected offices have special state mandated responsibilities that they do get paid above their base pay for.  For instance, County Clerks get $10,000 a year for being the County Election Officer, and County Treasurer’s get a sizable chunk (generally around $10,000, sometimes more) for being the Investment Officer and running their Motor Vehicle offices – these are all dictated by KSA 8-145, which is separate from the statutes dictating the responsibilities of the Clerk and Treasurer (state law is weird like that).

After the less than jubilant meeting on Monday night, on Tuesday I began emailing the County Clerks of neighboring counties to get their salary schedules.  These schedules are all public record, so they’re pretty easy to get (well, except for Neosho County, which I never heard back from even after sending a KORA request).  What I found surprised me – I figured we were behind our neighbors on salaries, but I was not aware just HOW behind we are.  Before we go further, I want to state that I’m not writing this article as an endorsement for any set salary for any set office.  If I were to guess, the resolution passed on Monday night is very likely to be reconfigured, because that’s just political reality…but, I’m willing to take some heat here and say that it’s not as crazy as it seems when you compare it to what our neighboring counties, including smaller ones, are paying.  What I think everyone who reads this will agree on is that we have people who have served this County well for years, some for over a decade, who are WAAAAY underpaid, particularly when ALL of their positions require special skills and experience that are in short supply in rural America.  These are not jobs you want to fill using the same labor pool as fast food and retail.  The fact that many of them are incredibly specialized and yet 1) have no real education or experience requirements and 2) are determined by what amounts to a popularity contest is pretty insane, but that’s another topic for another article.

For this article I’m gonna stick with the five elected positions of Clerk, Treasurer, Register of Deeds, Sheriff, and County Attorney.  I’ve thrown in Commissioner salaries largely just for fun..but I do think we underpay our Commissioners.  I’ve combined Bourbon County’s old and new salary schedules with the new salary schedules from Allen, Cherokee, Labette, and Linn Counties into what I hope is an easy to read graph HERE. 

If you take a look, you might be surprised by what you find – I certainly was.  If you want to look at the individual salary schedules I received from the counties, you can go here. Again, I may lose some of my “clout” as the kids call it these days by saying this, but looking at it in context, I don’t think the new Bourbon County salary schedule is as crazy as it first appeared.  Should it be stair-stepped across a couple of years given the cash reserve crunch we’re currently experiencing (if you watched Monday night’s meeting, it was clear that we are still in a tight spot cash reserves-wise), or should we just tear the band-aid off now and get it over with, maybe with a few nips and tucks?  I can see an argument for both.  What I do know from my own political experience is that our elected officials’ pay will continue to get further behind the more it is dragged out.  There is also the almost certainty that if our Sheriff, Treasurer, Clerk and Register of Deeds are this behind, how likely is it that many of our un-elected employees are ALSO that behind, or further, victims of a can kicked down the road in some cases for many, many years?

These are questions that make me glad I’m not currently a County Commissioner, nor eligible to run for another four years due to the recent redistricting.  I wanted to close by saying this – knowing all of them, and having worked with most of them, I don’t think we have a single elected official that isn’t worthy of a substantial pay raise, and who have unfortunately found themselves the victims of a long line of politicians playing kick the can when it came to their incomes.  They all have long, difficult, and often thankless jobs that few people have the education, training, or experience to do,and they deserve our respect for that.

Now, you can stop reading this article now and pretty much have the full story, but I just realized I didn’t cover the whole Department of Labor Salary Rules part of this controversy, so if you’d like, stick around a bit longer and I’ll run through that.

Epilogue: That Whole Department of Labor Rule Deal
If you watched the County’s budget process last summer, you’ll know that the reason (if we’re being honest, almost certainly the only reason) sizable salary raises were being discussed was because it appeared the federal government was going to force those salaries to be raised.  A new rule enacted by the Biden Department of Labor, would have bumped the minimum salary for executive, administrative, and professional (EAP) exemptions (aka salaried folks) to a base salary of $58,656 on January 1st, 2025.  This would have by default been a substantial and in my opinion needed increase to the salaries of many of our full-time Bourbon County officials.  With this rule scheduled to go into effect on January 1st, 2025, extra money for the increased salaries had to be budgeted for 2025 to ensure compliance with the rule.  However, two things happened late in the year, well after the budget process for every county in the country was completed, that threw a wrinkle into things. 

First, the State of Texas sued the Department of Labor over the rule, and the rule was overturned in mid November.  Now the Department of Labor appealed the decision, but that appeal will now be in front of one of the most conservative appeals courts in the country.  The double whammy is that even if the appeal is granted, by that time Donald Trump will be in office, and a Trump Department of Labor is unlikely to pick up a baton from the Biden Department of Labor and run with it.  So yes, the federal mandate was real, right up until it got upended at the end of the year, and the Presidential election was likely the final nail in its coffin.  That being said, I’m glad it all happened, as it forced our former County Commission to tackle an issue most County Commissions would just as turn a blind eye to, at a time when it was long overdue.

Nick Graham
Uniontown, Kansas