The Greene County Board of Supervisors recently approved salary raises for elected county officials for the next fiscal year.

This past December, the Greene County Compensation Board, which consists of individuals that represent each of the elected county offices, recommended a 15-percent salary raise for county attorney and sheriff, ten-percent for treasurer and auditor and eight-percent for each supervisor and recorder. The reason for the higher increase for sheriff was due to a new state law that required county sheriffs to be paid within the same salary range as Iowa State Patrol administrative staff. 

The County Supervisors approved all of the recommendations, with the exception of their own salary increase, which they approved by a 4-1 vote to lower the percentage from eight to seven. Supervisor Chair John Muir explains why the Board chose to reduce their increase.

“We weren’t going to hold ourselves to a higher value and reward than anybody else under the county employment. And seven-percent is where we ended up with a lot of non-elected positions. The workload has increased a lot since why we felt there was justification for some raise, but we I guess just felt like it wasn’t right for us be higher than what we thought was a good recommendation for unelected officials.”     

Compensation Board Chair Guy Richardson previously told Raccoon Valley Radio following their meeting in December about why there were different percentages recommended, instead of an across-the-board decision.

“There are different duties and certainly that the duties in those different offices have a different amount of bearing on what happens in the county. There’s a lot more responsibility to some of those jobs than there is to others. I think you need to look at those things appropriately and you need to look at that with salaries too when you’re thinking about that.”   

The Supervisors voted 4-1 in favor of the other elected officials salary raises, with Supervisor Tom Contner voting no twice, with the other no vote on the reduction of the Supervisors raise.