BC judge says county being hammered as budget process begins

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Baxter County Judge Mickey Pendergrass says the county is being hammered with four big ticket items as the quorum court budget committee begins its work for the upcoming year. The budget committee will meet at 4 Monday afternoon to begin work on next year’s budget.
Referring to the four items as the “big dogs in the room,” Judge Pendergrass says two of the four are the result of mandates, one by the voters and the second by the federal government. The third big ticket item has been negotiated downward and a fourth is a much-talked-about purchase that may have to wait.One of the two mandated items is the minimum wage increase approved by voters in 2018. With the passage of Issue 5, Arkansas’s minimum hourly wage increased to $9.25 last January and will increase to $10 next Jan. 1 and to $11 on Jan. 1, 2021.




Judge Pendergrass says the county spent about $20,000 just two years ago to hire a consultant to align the county’s wage scale.


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Pendergrass says addressing the minimum wage requirement is not just a matter of addressing the compensation of those employees at the bottom of the pay scale. Increasing the minimum wage leads to a compression of wages at all levels of the scale.


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The proposal to the budget committee addressing both the 2020 and the 2021 minimum wage increases and the wage scale adjustments as a result of the voter mandate has a price tag of just under $300,000.

The second non-negotiable item is a federal government mandate increasing the minimum salary threshold to qualify for exemption from the overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).




Pendergrass says the county has 14-15 employees impacted by this change. Those individuals are exempt, not entitled to overtime compensation and are available 24/7.


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Judge Pendergrass says the cost to meet the federal mandate will be over $25,000.

In part two of our report, Judge Pendergrass addresses an increase in what is already a $1 million annual expense that has been negotiated downward and the much-talked-about purchase that may have to wait. He’ll also speak to what these added expenses could mean to Baxter County taxpayers.

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