Marathon County to pump millions more into wages

With more than two-thirds of Marathon County’s employees being paid below market averages and many workers leaving for better-paying jobs, county administration has been directed to include a bump in compensation that is estimated to cost the county at least $3.5 million.

Members of the Human Resources, Finance and Capital Committee (HRFC) last Wednesday reviewed the results of a compensation study done by McGrath Human Resources Group, which found that 67 percent of county employees are below the market midpoint wage for their positions, and another 20 percent are at risk of falling below that benchmark. In response, the HRFC voted to bring county employees’ wages up to the 55th percentile of the market range and to lock in those increases with annual raises in the future that keep up with the job market.

Committee chairman John Robinson said the motion does need to go to the full board for its approval, but it will have a significant impact on 2026 budget deliberations.

“I feel like we’re going to be digging in the couch cushions for this budget,” said supervisor Ann Lemmer, who expressed concerns about the possibility of cutting services in order to pay for higher wages.

County administrator Lance Leonhard, who strongly recommended the wage increases as essential to retaining county employees, said he is always looking for ways to make the county more cost-effective, which may mean eliminating unfilled positions.

“If we’ve found ways to have a vacant position for seven months, I’m not going to fill it because we don’t truly need it,” he said.

Malayna Halvorson-Maes, a senior consultant at McGrath, went over the results of her firm’s study, which compared Marathon County’s wages to those paid by 20 other counties in Wisconsin and a variety of munic- ipalities, including the villages of Edgar and Stratford and cities of Duluth and Rochester, Minn.

Halvorson-Maes said compensation is the number one reason employees leave their jobs, especially when they can get paid more in the private sector, making it very difficult for government employers to retain experienced staff. Since McGrath last conducted a compensation for the county in 2022, market pressures have only gotten greater, she said.

According to the most recent data, over half of the people who leave their jobs at Marathon County do so within five years of being hired, and a quarter quit after less than a year.

In 2022, the county board agreed to reset wages at the 50th percentile, meaning that half of employers in the market were paying more than the county and half were paying less. The total cost of that across-the-board increase was about $2.7 million.

Leonhard said he is “100 percent confident” that the county can find the funding to bring salaries and wages up to the 55th percentile. The option of going up to the 60th percentile is asking too much of the budget, he said, but staying at the 50th percentile is not sustainable.

Leonhard reiterated comments he has made before about the importance of recruiting and retaining highly qualified employees with higher wages and better benefits.

“This is critical to us being able to deliver services,” he said. “As I said before, we need really good people. We are behind.”

Supervisor Scott Poole questioned the inclusion of Dane County, the second-most populous county in Wisconsin, in the list used to compare compensation. Halvorson-Maes said Dane County was included because it offers many of the same services that Marathon County does, including a landfill and the newly opened forensic center.

When it comes to services like the regional morgue, Halvorson-Maes said the county is actually competing with large metro areas for certain positions, but that does not apply to all of county employees at every level.

Supervisor Gayle Marshall said she was OK with moving the county’s compensation schedule up to the 55th percentile, but she wondered why Marathon County wasn’t following the lead of other high-performing organizations by cutting the number of fulltime employees over time.

Leonhard said Washington County, which has a similar population, has been been able to reduce it workforce by double-digits over the last 10 years by selling a number of parks, downsizing its parks department and sharing its health department with another county.

At the same time, Leonhard said Marathon County has also downsized a few of its departments, reducing the number of employees in the county clerk’s office and sharing employees between departments. Ultimately, though, he said it’s up to the board if it wants to cut services and employees.

Board chairman Kurt Gibbs noted that every committee agenda at this time of year has a recurring item asking for ideas on reducing services or increasing fees, but no proposals have been presented. “We can cut services,” he said. “There’s no question we can, but that’s not been the direction provided to administration by the standing committees.”

Robinson said running a more cost-effective county government requires a qualified, stable workforce.

“When you’re constantly turning over your staff, you have inefficiencies,” he said. “If we’re looking at process improvement and other things, your retention rate is critical to being more efficient.”

‘Half-day’ Fridays, new holiday

In addition to offering better pay in order to keep employees, the HRFC also signed off on a plan to allow county employees in multiple departments to close their offices to the public on Friday afternoons.

Right now, the public access hours for county departments at the courthouse in downtown Wausau and at the Lakeview Drive campus are 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday (42.5 hours per week.) This does not include several county operations, such as the sheriff’s office and the highway department, which have their own schedules.

Under the new system, public access at the courthouse and Lakeview Drive will start a half-hour earlier, at 7:30 a.m., and continue running until 4:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday, but the offices will close at noon on Fridays. Employees in those offices will still be expected to work 40-hour weeks, but they will no longer have to interact with the public on Friday afternoons.

Leonhard said this will allow employees more time to focus on work they are unable to get done when their offices are open, and because fewer members of the public visit county offices in person these days, the level of service shouldn’t be drastically impacted.

The committee’s proposal also includes the addition of a 10th paid holiday every year, which would bring Marathon County more in line with other counties and municipalities, with the possibility of adding an 11th holiday a year from now. A list of comparable government employees indicate that most of them offer 10 or more holidays.

Second only to compensation, a lack of work/life balance is another reason many departing employees give for quitting, so the idea of adding a holiday and decreasing office hours is seen as an improvement.

Leonhard said implementing the new office hour schedule would take about 60 days, and the new holiday would come into effect next spring around Easter.