Reestablishment of longevity pay benefits and 3% deferred compensation for non-represented employees has been recognized as a competitive necessity to increase the City’s ability to attract and retain experienced management employees. This recognition has been coming slowly over the last decade, but has accelerated dramatically since 2020 with global changes in workforce availability.  The recruitment and retention of qualified employees has become increasingly difficult across all fields and employers, and it has been especially challenging to attract and retain highly specialized, experienced employees.  Many of these technical, professional, supervisory and/or management positions are not covered by collective bargaining groups; and therefore, fall into the “non-represented” employee group within the City of Yakima.

The City's wage and compensation packages have progressively fallen behind compared to other comparable agencies, resulting now in substantial hiring challenges.  Many advanced recruitments have been unsuccessful or produced extremely limited candidates. This combined with employers offering opportunities for 100% remote work, has increased our competition and further harming the City’s recruitment and retention efforts. Compression issues between the non-represented group and those they supervise have also become significant, negatively impacting employee morale and retention.

Currently, employees hired after 2012 are not provided the same benefit package as their peers who were hired prior to 2012 causing a contentious split within the same group.  This causes both discontent and conflicts with the Yakima City Charter, which outlines the tenets of “equal work for equal pay.”  Also, due to the compression issues created by PACA (pay and adjustment compensation) being cancelled over the years, some of the management team receive total compensation packages that values less than those of their subordinates who are in represented groups. Realigning the benefit packages to ensure all members of the non-represented group receive equivalent benefits will not only improve employee equity, moral and most importantly, retention; but, it will also enable the City to be far more competitive with other employers when trying to attract experienced candidates to accept hard-to-fill positions. This change will currently impact twenty-two individuals with an associated cost of approximately $75,000 in 2023.