MADISON, Wis. — The Dane County finance committee unanimously voted to deny a plan to pay Dane County full-time employees a one-time $1,000 “inflation offset” payment using federal Covid stimulus funds.
The move came after the plan failed to garner the support of the county’s newly-elected board chair, Patrick Miles, who forwarded a memo with additional information to the board on Sunday evening.
County executive Joe Parisi had helped created the plan and four county supervisors introduced it to the board. The Wisconsin State Journal reported in April that the $3 million plan would send $1,000 checks to full-time employees and prorated payments to part-time employees, impacting 2,430 employees and some additional limited-term employees.
“Public employees have worked around the clock since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic to provide basic services,” Parisi said in a statement to News 3 Now. “This proposed payment was an extension of gratitude for all the hours they’ve put in to help people during the most challenging years of this generation.”
Miles said on Monday, ahead of a vote on the item in a county finance committee meeting, that he didn’t think Parisi had done his due diligence in creating the plan.
In a memo to county board members Sunday evening, Miles said he had asked the county’s director of administration Greg Brockmeyer for more information about the origins of the plan. Brockmeyer told him there was no request for the one-time payments from any employee, employee group, or bargaining unit; there had also been no data-gathering about how the plan might impact issues like employee retention.
Brockmeyer also wasn’t aware of any other municipalities in Wisconsin doing similar one-time payments, Miles wrote. The city of Madison tried and failed to do similar one-time inflation adjustment payments last year using American Rescue Plan funds–at a price point of $2,661 to city employees. That wouldn’t have included employees in the police, fire, or Teamster bargaining units, who all received raises in 2021. The plan was ultimately scrapped because it didn’t comply with federal rules for spending the ARPA funds, a technicality that the county says was avoided in their version of the plan.
County employees got a 3% raise in January and are set to receive another 3% raise in July.
In response to Miles’ questions to employee groups about whether they supported the payments, one group’s president said they had discussed the payments in a recent group leadership meeting.
“The general feeling was that while we appreciate the impulse to share windfalls with county employees, we also recognize that a one-time, non-recurring payment is not going to address ongoing inflation in any serious way,” he wrote. “It’s also hard to see how a one-time payment in 2022 would affect recruitment in 2023 or 2024, let alone retention in those years.”
Miles said in an interview that he and a handful of other board members were receiving a lot of opposition to the plan from constituents in direct emails. The nearly $3 million in one-time payments would be funded by the federal American Rescue Plan Act; municipalities have until 2024 to use those funds.
“If we learned anything from the start of this pandemic…it’s that it’s unpredictable,” Miles said. He pointed to the need to send extra funding to the county’s Second Harvest foodbank as an example of needs that may need funding in the future from ARPA. “We need to be in a position where we can be ready to respond when there are acute needs that arise.”
The recommendation for denial will get taken up by the county board.