Many Portage city employees will be getting a pay raise, but exact numbers may not come until the new year.
The 2025 salary ordinance adopted by the city council last week includes a 2.5-percent cost-of-living adjustment for non-union city employees. Fire department administration will get a 3.8-percent increase to match their employees' raises, under their union contract. Raises for other employees will depend on the outcome of their unions' contract negotiations. No raises are included for elected officials.
The ways and means committee initially asked the full council to table next year's salary ordinance, until contract negotiations and a wage study could be completed. But council member Collin Czilli didn't think it was fair to make the rest of the employees wait.
"I think the message that sends to city employees is a terrible message," Czilli said. "'You have to wait for everybody else to negotiate, figure out what crumbs are left and then you get the crumbs.' I just don't think that's right."
He said he wanted to guarantee the cost-of-living adjustment now and possibly revisit bigger raises later.
Mayor Austin Bonta was hopeful that contracts with the unions would be reached by the end of the year, but there's no guarantee that will happen. And he admitted that his plans for a larger wage overhaul this year were probably too ambitious.
"But I do think that, knowing that we have the money for a cost-of-living increase, I think that that is a separate matter from a performance-based pay because we know we have it, and we're talking about less than $75,000 here, to make sure that people's current pay keeps up with the cost of living," Bonta told council members.
City officials estimated that a wage study could take three months to a year, depending on how much information they want to get.
