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Regular City Council Meeting Monday,April 17, 2023 Page 3 representatives who are trying to compile this, but Abdo has a pretty good start on it, she did not know if it was anything she would be willing to throw out there yet. Ms. Olson explained staff does have a list of cities that have been historically used, particularly through this past compensation study that was done in 2013 as well as for some of the City's union negotiations. Staff does have those cities that have been provided to Abdo that can be narrowed down. The focus is really on what criteria the City wants to use to find those comparable cities. Councilmember Strahan asked why the City does not utilize County, State or other public entities in the comparable study. Ms. Davis explained School Districts do not report the same way as cities do. There has historically been good participation from counties in the League of Minnesota Cities study,for example,but there is also the fact that the jobs do not usually match up all that well. In her experience, County hourly base pay tends to be a little lower than in a city setting so it can skew the data a little bit to include too much of that County data. Abdo can include it where it really does make sense and will. Councilmember Schroeder wondered when talking about comparison, if Abdo was including all the other benefits as well when doing a comparative. Ms. Davis indicated Abdo will be soliciting through the survey some benefit information with whatever can be provided. What is important to note though is that it is much more difficult to quantify, in terms of what is the market, and a number cannot always be assigned to a benefit that then can be compared to one another. What Abdo does is put together a matrix for the City that basically shows what the City is offering and then by benefit type compared to other cities. The one area where more comparative data can be captured is paid time off because it is easy to count days or hours for those kinds of things and to get a good understanding of at what point does a person have x number of hours or those types of things. Abdo will get at some of that, but base pay is what is driving the compensation structure and then the City can use that benefit data to sort of figure out the total compensation picture. Councilmember Schroeder thought a lot of times the other benefits can be an attraction for people when looking at where they want to be in a pay range. Councilmember Strahan wondered if most of the insurance plans for the cities are self-insured and if the comparisons were accurate. Ms. Davis explained Abdo asks for information about the plans offered and a lot of times, Abdo will get information back about comparable cities with similar packages. She indicated Abdo does get levels of plans and information about high level benefits. She indicated she will add that to their notes.