Some of the results from the city’s recently completed salary survey were presented during Tuesday’s Lake Charles City Council agenda meeting. The city conducts salary surveys every few years in hopes of improving the starting pay and possibly even supplying other employees with raises. The information presented at the meeting was just an overview of the survey, which focused primarily on three categories: career employees, firefighters and police officers.

Daryl Burckel, a professor of accounting at McNeese State University who helped conduct the survey, presented the information to the council. Burckel said the five locations used in the survey for salary comparisons were Calcasieu Parish, Lafayette, Bossier, Baton Rouge and Alexandria. For the section of the survey focused on fire and police, all of the same locations were used except for Calcasieu Parish.

Burckel began his presentation by saying the city’s pay for civil service positions was 98 percent below average compared with the other cities in the survey. He said Lake Charles was even more below average when compared with Calcasieu Parish.

Burckel said the place where Lake Charles performed in the survey was in fringe benefits for its employees. One of the specific benefits he mentioned was health care, and he explained the type of coverage the city provides for employees.

“About one-third of employees have chosen not to pay anything toward their health insurance, but the city of Lake Charles still provides health insurance and pays for health insurance,” Burckel said. “It’s just that those employees have a higher deductible than the employes who do pay.”

Burckel moved on to talking about the Police Department. He said the most important numbers for the department deal with the starting pay for new employees because of the way new officers can eventually be promoted.

“You don’t hire captains from outside and put them in. People are generally promoted from within,” Burckel said. “It’s the beginning pay that has to be competitive in order to stay competitive as you go further up the chain.”

Lake Charles is 24 cents below average when it comes to police pay, or under 2 percent. He said that if the supplemental pay is removed for those first-year officers, then the amount would jump to 38 cents, or almost 3 percent below average. The survey does show that the city is above average on vacation days for police, but there are also fewer scheduled holidays.

Burckel said the city compensates officers for education, meaning officers with bachelor’s degrees get up to $100 more per month. He said none of the other cities in the survey did this. He also talked about how the city was far above average in terms of retirement contributions for the department, at 31.5 percent.

For the Fire Department, the survey showed that the city’s average starting pay was almost $2,100, or 7.3 percent, below average. The Fire Department did not have education incentives. Burckel said that like the police, a positive for the department was the city’s retirement contributions, which exceeded the average. The city contributes over 29 percent.(MGNonline)