Fannin County Sheriff Dane Kirby is requesting an 18 percent increase in salaries for the Sheriff’s Office and Detention Center employees in 2020.
“We’ve put in a request for a pay increase to get us up with where I feel like we need to be and where I feel like our people deserve to be,” Kirby said during the Board of Commissioners budget hearings Wednesday, October 9. “You can see, based on what the other counties are doing, that’s about what it would take to get us there.”
He said he had communicated with surrounding counties to determine the appropriate pay for his staff and expressed an issue with finding quality employees to come work in the county if he were to lose any of his own.
“Honestly, even if I did have positions that I could fill, it would be so hard to find anybody to fill them,” he said.
He explained that people from other counties are moving to work for higher pay in Metro Atlanta and the positions they are leaving offer higher pay than Fannin. He fears this could cause a “domino effect” and result in a loss of Fannin County employees.
“It’s the domino effect and I can’t have that starting to happen,” Kirby said. “I’m trying to prevent that.”
Chairman Stan Helton brought up an increase in salaries in 2016 stating, “Your department got a 16.73 percent increase three years ago. The reasons were basically the same given then as it is now.”
Kirby responded, “When I took office, it was embarrassing what we started with. You can’t do everything all at once. You have to work in increments. … The first thing that I did was every year I would put a 2.5 percent pay increase in our budget, which started inching us up minutely every single year.
“We would have been nine years in when we asked for the 16 percent raise. Nine years at 2.5 percent hadn’t even scratched the surface of what we needed to be doing.”
According to Helton, if the salary request is granted, the two departments will see a 52 percent increase between 2016 and 2020.
“I’m gonna be straight with you … this is a very hard pill for me to swallow,” Helton said. “It’s a lot of money. $400,000, in addition, for the same people, and I know for plenty of people that may not be the popular thing to say, but you know me I’m going to be as straight with you as I can.
“I guess these big steps like that really kind of scare me, particularly when we’re doing everything we can to keep the taxes in the county low.”
Kirby said, “What it boils down to is, evidently from looking at what’s been going on around us, the other counties have been taking the big steps because they are where they are today. Maybe some of that falls back on me for just asking for 2.5 percent for the last few years, every year. Maybe we should have been asking for bigger steps all throughout the years because the bottom line is we’re behind and I’m just here asking to fix it.”
Helton said he didn’t disagree stating, “I don’t really disagree with you. If you’ve got a problem, to fix it, but can you fix it in one year or not? That’s my challenge because that’s a big chunk of money to come up with.”
The board will continue to look over the budget request and communicate with Kirby to determine a final proposed budget for the department before advertising it in order to pass the final 2020 budget in December.