The Pulaski County Council wants more information before agreeing to a salary change for the victim’s assistance coordinator. During last week’s meeting, Prosecutor Dan Murphy explained that the position is funded primarily by federal grant money distributed by the Indiana Criminal Justice Institute.
“The problem with it is that the person that we have working under the grant, according to your matrix, is making one level of pay, and the federal government has made this person a supervisor at a different level,” he said. Murphy asked council members to take the victim’s assistance coordinator out of the county’s salary matrix, in order to comply with the conditions of the grant.
But Council Member Ken Boswell said that based on conversations between the county’s attorney and representatives from the Indiana Criminal Justice Institute, it was his understanding that the county still had ultimate control over the pay level. “There’s nothing in there that says that you have to pay them a specific wage,” Boswell said. “The county sets the wage, versus whatever their priority is, and it’s a reimbursable grant. The prosecutor puts in an anticipated wage to justify the grant, but this does no way establish the actual pay of the employee at the county.”
Murphy said the county can decide on the wage, but only until the grant gets final approval. “Based upon what we negotiated last summer, this is the grant that we came up with,” he said. “If you guys want to take over managing it and negotiating it, that’s fine with me. You can negotiate any levels you want. But once you do that, then you’re responsible for the documentation of it, too.”
In the end, council members voted to table the matter, until they could get more information from the county attorney, with Mike Tiede opposing the motion. “Why can’t we just get it done?” Tiede asked. “Get it done! It’s like $8,000, then we’re going to get $122,000, and then we get a person that takes care of people that have actually been robbed.”
Boswell responded that he was concerned with granting exceptions to the salary matrix for some county departments and not others.
