MORE: Kettering finishing fourth new fire station in $30 million project
Schwieterman’s new deal includes an annual salary of $177,923.20 as a base and various incentives that put him in line with what his compensation package was last year, $196,443. The incentives include a 10-percent retirement plan contribution ($17,792), annual car allowance of $4,500, a $480 yearly cell phone allotment, plus a cash-out of accrued vacation leave.
“I have been blessed to serve this community for the last 30 years, and I look forward to the next four years and appreciate the council’s confidence in me to do so,” Schwieterman said following the approval of his new deal.
The 2018 Kettering city budget approved last December included total personnel costs of $51 million. That’s two-thirds of the city’s operating budget.
The figure included a planned 2-percent across-the-board pay increase. But the city recently negotiated agreement on union contracts that call for 2.5-percent increases, and it will match those raises for non-union workers as well, which council approved this week.
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“This is what we traditionally end up doing every three years or so, once we finish with the union negotiations for non-union employees,” Mayor Don Patterson said.
According to the city’s human resource department, the city employs about 400 regular full-time employees, 100 regular part-time employees, 30 part-time firefighters and more than 500 seasonal employees. The raises are for the full- and part-time workers.
Resident Sterling Abernathy asked council: “What is the total additional cost of the pay increases you just approved?”
The retroactive raises will cost the city approximately $94,000 for non-union employees, according to Schwieterman. Union raises would cost about $250,000 total, using figures provided by Schwieterman.
Schwieterman explained that the passage of the pay ordinance “essentially takes care of two items.”
“The first item is the majority of the recently negotiated union contracts that cover portions of, if not all of 2018, 2019 and 2020” he said. “I mention portions simply because some of the union contracts are calendar year and some are at different intervals of the year.”
The second item was was matching the raises given to union employees for non-union workers.
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The city of Kettering paid more than 120 employees more than $100,000 in 2017 according to the Dayton Daily News Investigates Payroll Project searchable database of public employees.
As for Schwieterman’s pay, a snapshot of salaries for local city managers in 2017 reveals that Dayton’s Shelley Dickstein made $196,117; Oakwood’s Norbert Klopsch, $164,421; Beavercreek’s Pete Landrum, $133,477; Wayne Davis of Centerville, $169,998; and Bryan Chodkowski of Moraine, $145,000.
The region’s highest-paid city manager is Joshua Smith of Hamilton, who was paid $235,219 last year. That city has its own water and electric utilities with a budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
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