NEWPORT BEACH : Council to Review Pay Policy Report

The City Council today will review a report on the pay policy for city employees, a policy that the Newport Beach Police Employees Assn. says keeps its members from getting fair wages.

The report’s authors conclude that while “the policy as applied has achieved its primary objectives of recruiting and retaining top quality employees . . . the policy is ‘definition-deadlocked’ in that it creates expectations which exceed the underlying intent of the policy.”

The report offers 10 suggestions for changing the 11-year-old policy, ranging from eliminating it completely to keeping it intact.

“I don’t think there’s any (suggestion) that we would say is the answer,” said Sgt. Steve Van Horn, a representative of the 200-member police association. “There are some we feel definitely have some merit and could work, but we really need to sit down with the council and discuss it.”

Prepared by the city’s budget committee, the report comes after four of the city’s five unions, including the police association, requested a review of the pay policy, known as J-1, at a council meeting in August.

One of the main issues is the policy’s method of determining employees’ pay, which averages the wages of employees in the county’s three highest-paying cities and uses the average as a benchmark for Newport Beach employees.

Workers say the policy works in theory, but because the averages are not taken for each department, some Newport Beach workers are receiving high wages while others earn wages lower than the three highest-paid departments elsewhere in the county.

For example, this year, Newport Beach used Huntington Beach, Fullerton and Anaheim for comparison, but police employees say Irvine and Santa Ana are the cities with the highest-paid officers and argue that their pay should be based on the average police pay in those cities.

The council is scheduled to review the policy and take input from the police, fire, marine, clerical and general employees’ unions, but it is not expected to immediately vote on the report’s recommendations.