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| AZ County COs Get Pay Hike |
| By Tucson Citizen |
| Published: 11/21/2005 |
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Arizona county corrections officers will get raises next year, a step toward keeping trained jail officers and adding new ones to ease a chronic staffing shortage that may overwork them and put them at risk. The Pima County Board of Supervisors voted 5-0 last week to approve salary-step raises for corrections officers at the county's correctional facilities that will bring their pay more in line with corrections agencies run by the state and federal governments something that may prove critical when a planned new federal prison opens early next year off Wilmot Road. “We were looking at a serious problem with the federal prison coming on line next February," Mike Steber, president of the Pima Corrections Association, said after supervisors approved the raise package. About 30 county corrections officers have applied for jobs at the new prison, which would pay more than Pima officers receive under the current pay scale. The new pay scale, which goes into effect in April, will start new corrections officers at salaries about 18 percent above what the county now pays new officers, or from about $29,000 a year to almost $33,700. It also will reduce from eight years to fivethe span required for officers to reach the top of the salary range. The problem of recruiting and retaining corrections officers costs the county in the long run because officers must work overtime at time and a half to prevent shift shortages, Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik told the supervisors. About 60 to 80 corrections positions are vacant, the sheriff said. "We have a forest fire in Pima County corrections," Dupnik told the board. County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry said such overtime would cost the county almost $1.8 million in fiscal 2005-06 about $1.2 million more than what is budgeted. The raises will help to recruit and retain corrections officers, in no small part because county officers starting out or at the top of the pay scale soon will be within about $1 per hour of what federal corrections agencies now pay, Huckelberry said. Officers between their fourth and seventh years will make more than what their local U.S. counterparts earn, he said. |
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