What is a Management Resolution Anyway? - Council Corner August 2. 2025
This Council Corner was printed by Ashland.news on August 2, 2025.
There has been quite a lot of conversation in Ashland, driven by misinformation published online about the Management Resolution that is under discussion by the city council. So, I thought I would offer some context to help interested Ashlanders understand what is actually happening with this resolution and why. Strap in for an exhilarating discussion of city finances and union contracts!
City of Ashland Unions and the Management Pool
We have seven unions as well as a group of City employees who are not represented by unions. This group is called the “management pool.” It includes general clerical workers, parks employees, supervisors, department heads, our City Manager, and our City Attorney, among others. Currently, there are 69 positions in this pool, representing 92 employees.
While union contracts handle Cost of Living Adjustments, benefit changes, and salary adjustments for union employees, the Management Resolution does the same for employees in the Management Pool. Note that elected leader stipends are not addressed at all in the management resolution because they are handled in the charter, so Ashland residents need to vote to change those amounts. There is no discussion underway about increasing stipends for city council members.
Every two years, right after the budget is passed, the City completes negotiations for new contracts with the unions. Staff manages this process following Council direction, which is provided in executive session as it relates to employment contracts. Council direction regarding the union contracts, and sometimes the contracts themselves if they are completed in time, is then the basis of a Management Resolution that provides similar benefits across the city operation for employees who are not represented by a union.
This is standard practice that has been in place for many years in order to ensure that the City is treating employees fairly across the different departments, and that employees who are not represented by unions are not left behind. Otherwise, there would be no way for those in the Management Pool to get Cost of Living Allowance increases to keep up with inflation or to receive benefits that match the benefits received by the employees represented by unions.
Once the union contracts are complete, the City’s HR department has a lot of work to do to adjust salaries, etc., particularly since union contracts and the management resolution include salary increases that are retroactive to July 1, which is the start of the new fiscal year.
Compensation and Classification Study
If you’ve heard references to the “Comp and Class Study,” they are speaking about the Compensation and Classification Study that the City of Ashland undertook starting last year so that the data would be available for the 2025-27 fiscal years. Comp and class studies evaluate job roles and pay structures in an organization to make sure different jobs are appropriately classified and compensated, both internally and in relation to the external job market.
Cities undertake these studies to ensure a fair, reliable, and competitive compensation system so that they can attract and keep good employees. It’s important to remember that the City of Ashland is always competing with other municipal governments and the private sector for talent, so it is critical that we have positions classified correctly and offer competitive salaries.
When a comp and class study is done, the next step is to integrate that information into our system of classifying jobs at the City, and to make sure that we are compensating our staff appropriately based on the market for their particular job. This always requires some amount of adjustment of job classifications and salaries.
The last comp and class study was completed by the City of Ashland in 2008 -17 years ago. Recognizing that not having this data was hindering the City’s ability to know where we were in relation to other competing jurisdictions, at the end of the 2023-25 budget process, the City Council directed staff to hire expert help to complete a comp and class study, which they did and presented to the City Council on May 20th, 2025.
Salary Adjustments Following the Comp and Class Study
Not surprisingly given the time gap, many of our job classifications needed to be updated and salaries needed to be adjusted in many positions across the city. Like other cities, Ashland decides where we want to land on the competitiveness scale. Do we want to be a community that offers top dollar, one that offers bottom of the barrel salaries, or somewhere in between? A classic Goldilocks question.
In our case, we aimed right for the middle, Council discussed the comp and class study at the May 20th, 2025, City Council business meeting, and staff set about to make the adjustments to the various positions through the union contract negotiation process and the management resolution. While there are assumptions in town about Ashland paying exorbitant wages, the truth is, we were below the 50% mark in most of our positions, which is why they are being adjusted up through the union contracts and management resolution. Note that the highest raise for an unrepresented employee is $16,556 and the lowest is $1,335 per year.
The Management Resolution
In the past, the management resolution has come forward with the union contracts for City Council approval. Staff brought the management resolution forward on June 17th, during the union negotiation process, to get it in place ahead of July 1 since it represents over 35% of our staff and the existing management resolution expires June 30.
Moving the management resolution forward ahead of completing the union negotiations was designed to allow our small, but mighty, Human Resources Department to start processing the changes for those 35% of employees while the union negotiations were being completed. This earlier process also created transparency with unions as they could see what employment terms non-represented employees would receive while they were negotiating their contracts.
How the City Pays for Changes to Employee Contracts
New budgets assume a certain amount of increased payroll and benefits that will be in place during the timeframe of the budget. The 2025-27 budget recommended by the Citizens Budget Committee and adopted by Council represented our best estimate at the time for cost increases, but we know that best estimates often need to be adjusted when union contracts are finalized. Having some amount of funding in the budget to handle salary and benefit increases is critical because there are always Cost of Living Allowance adjustments at the very least to keep up with inflation.
This year, because the comp and class study was the first in17 years, there were many more adjustments needed to align positions and salaries with the study results than would have been typical. This resulted in the total amount needed to cover the salary increases being larger than what was budgeted for those increases. So, more work needs to be done to adapt the budget so that this gap can be covered in the best way possible that protects city services.
When staff brings the management resolution and final union contracts forward to Council in August, that process will include a proposal for closing that funding gap so that Council and the people of Ashland know what budget adjustments are being made to implement the full cost of aligning salaries with the comp and class study.
To better understand the methodology of the comp and class study or to see the salary impacts for specific positions, visit https://ashlandoregon.gov/626/Human-Resources.
What We Are Paying For
There tends to be an assumption that the highest paid people in any organization are the least necessary – that they are somehow grifters in the organization slacking off while everyone else does the real work. And that may be the case in some organizations, but it isn’t the case at the City of Ashland. Our highest paid people are those with the highest level skills (engineers, firefighters, electricians) and the people who take on the greatest responsibility – our department heads and other managers.
While it is always a good idea to continually evaluate an organization’s structure to ensure that it’s not becoming top heavy, and the City is actively doing this, some structure is always needed, even in private industry, because the buck has to stop somewhere. Someone has to take responsibility for ensuring high service levels with our utilities, police and fire departments, public works and community development departments, and our finance, legal, and other administrative services.
And in the world of competition for high quality employees, it is understood that an organization must compensate appropriately for the amount of responsibility they hold. Not doing so just ensures that smart, dedicated, valuable employees move on to other organizations that understand what it takes to carry that responsibility well. We are fortunate to have the staff leadership we have in Ashland, as well as the dedicated employees who work throughout the City of Ashland but are not represented by a union. Appropriate shifts in their salary and benefits through the management resolution is how we keep them.