Roger Baker, Gilpin County Manager.  The decision that was made by the Gilpin County Commissioners last Tuesday on the salaries for elected officials was the culmination of a great deal of discussion over the last few months.

As political subdivisions of the state, counties (except for two home rule counties, Pitkin and Weld, and the city/county hybrids of Denver and Broomfield) can’t establish their own salaries for elected officials, the way the Commissioners can for all the other county employees.

That’s ok—there’s some wisdom in not having elected officials voting on their own salaries—but in order to attract quality people to fill these roles, there has to be some mechanism for adjusting those salaries. After all, many of these positions—Sheriff, Assessor, Clerk & Recorder and Treasurer—also function as department heads, and without some flexibility one can easily (as has happened in Gilpin County) end up with employees making more money than their supervisors, which can cause all sorts of problems.

So the state legislature, recognizing that there was a problem (because they faced the unpleasant task of having to approve their own raises) years ago established an elected officials salary commission to review these salaries from the governor all the way down through the various county offices and make recommendations to the legislature for approval.

But even then the legislature didn’t have the appetite for making such potentially controversial decisions—and the longer they delayed doing so, the worse the problem became.

With no county elected officials receiving increases of any sort (not even cost of living adjustments) since 2007, the legislature finally realized that something needed to be done and in early 2015 passed a bill (Senate Bill 288) that promised to solve the problem once and for all—but still required some tough decisions to be made.

Specifically, because of the legislative inaction for all these years, bringing county officials salaries up to market levels at one time would cause a considerable financial hit, even though the increases wouldn’t go into effect for any current elected official until and unless he or she was re-elected—so 2019 for most of the officials in Gilpin County.

So the legislature let counties choose essentially what percentage increase they wanted to accept—and fund (the money isn’t coming from the state, after all).

The state had already established “categories” of counties, recognizing that larger, busier counties would probably have to pay higher salaries than smaller counties to attract quality officials. Now they have established subcategories, so even counties of similar size and resources can decide what salaries seemed both equitable and affordable.

Tuesday, the Commissioners opted—after several work sessions with the other elected officials, and discussion of the budgetary ramifications—to become a Category III-B county. That means the raises that will go into effect in future years will be less than if they had done nothing (and remained a Category III-A) county, but more than if they had requested reclassification as a III-C or III-D county.

And though the raises seem significant (because of the amount of time since the previous increases), for most Gilpin County officials they work slightly more than 2% per year—about in line with what other County employees have received in adjustments and merit increases over the same period.

Even better, the legislature enacted a provision that institutes an automatic increase for inflation based on the local consumer price index. Even then, that increase would never occur during any given elected official’s term, but only when a new term of office begins.

So, hopefully, they won’t have to go through this ordeal again.