ELY – The Ely City Council approved pay raises for several supervisors Tuesday night and then scheduled performance reviews for those city employees later this month in a move one council member likened to getting the cart ahead of the horse.

“We should be doing performance reviews and then raises,” said Paul Kess. “If we want to be technical about this, we can wait until after performance reviews and then trust that the new council will go ahead with the recommended raises.”

Mayor Ross Petersen explained that the negotiating committee worked on the pay raises to be approved by the end of the year. “Then it came up that performance reviews had not been done after the raises were negotiated.”

Negotiating committee member Warren Nikkola said, “We didn’t receive an invitation to negotiate until the prior council meeting.”

So performance reviews for the Police Chief, Clerk-Treasurer, Deputy Clerk, Library Director and Assistant Treasurer will be held at 5 p.m. on Dec. 30 at the Joint Facilities building.

A three-year contract for the Police Chief, a supervisor of essential employees, was approved. The position was paid $69,942 in 2014 with three percent pay raises scheduled for 2015 and 2016, and a two-percent raise in 2017.

In addition, there will be an increase in the monthly stipend for required meetings from $160 to $170 per month. Daily pay for court on scheduled days off will increase from $132 to $137 per half day. Cell phone stipend will be increased from $30 per month to $50 per month.

The supervisors of other than non-essential employees will get a three-percent raise next year and two percent raises in 2016 and 2017. Next year, the Clerk-Treasurer will be paid $101,120; the Deputy Clerk will be paid $52,793; the Library Director will be paid $60,935; and the Assistant Treasurer will be paid $69,602.

Enrollment for health insurance coverage is underway.

Kess was looking for more feedback and information in order to complete the performance reviews. City Attorney Kelly Klun said the review structure has been in place for the last several years.

“I would like to be able to get more feedback from broader constituencies,” Kess said. “For example, when I go to review the fire chief, I really wouldn’t know how effective he is as a fire chief. It might be useful for me to have some input from the firemen, the people he supervises directly, to use as we provide our evaluations.”

Nikkola said if an evaluator has queries like that, “perhaps you can go out and ask those specific questions yourself. Now you are getting into a situation where we are asking the people that are getting supervised what kind of job their supervisor is doing. I think that is, personally, absolutely backwards and inappropriate,” he said.

Kess said he is regularly evaluated by his students at Vermilion Community College. “I’m a little uncomfortable with gathering information anecdotally and using this as part of a performance review,” he said. “I’m not sure that that’s easily done or easily usable, legally. I’m just exploring the possibilities of how we might get better information.”

Klun said her concern with getting outside performance opinions was with the timing and getting the reviews done by the end of the year.

“To be honest, we’re at a situation now where it will take a year or two for new council members to get enough experience on this,” Petersen said. “Admittedly, we got started late and I think we should do it the way we’ve always done and the new council can explore different ideas.”

Kess responded, “This is coming up from (Employee Relations Committee) at the last minute and scheduling this for the last possible day, practically, and it seems we should have a more timely process than this.”

Petersen said, “This did kind of fall through the cracks and we could see that this needed to be done.”

Other business

In other action, the council:

‰ Designated Dec. 30, 2014, as Mike Hillman Day in Ely, in honor of the former council member who recently died;

‰ Approved all 2015 tobacco license renewal applications;

‰OK’d a change order for the 8th Avenue alley sewer work between Harvey and Sheridan, deceasing the contract amount by $24,871;

‰ Authorized a change order for the library construction project in the amount of $1,332, with a final cost of $1,270,920;

‰ Approved the first reading of the city’s Fence Code ordinance.