The 2015 hiring and salary freeze announced by Governor Mary Fallin wasn’t the kind of freeze most Oklahomans think of when considering state government. Turns out, thousands of state workers still got pay raises that totaled millions of dollars and state agency heads did it by using things such as “exemptions” and “market adjustments,” according to an investigation by News 9’s Alex Cameron and OK Energy Today.
To be precise, more than 13,000 state workers got pay raises and salary adjustments at a time when Governor Fallin’s announcement on Feb. 6, 2015 indicated there would be none. Even the energy-related agencies took part in those pay raises including the Department of Environmental Quality, the Water Resources Board, the Aeronautics Commission, the Department of Mines, the Grand River Dam Authority, the State Corporation Commission, the Scenic Rivers Commission, the Transportation Department and the Oklahoma Turnpike Authority.
The most common excuse in giving pay raises, some which totaled into the thousands of dollars, was through the use of “market adjustment,” where state agency directors determined an employee needed a pay raise to meet what similar workers in the private sector were making.
Each of the more than 13,000 pay hikes had to be approved by an appropriate cabinet secretary.
“It was just another management tool for the government to have at its disposal,” explained Preston Doerflinger, the State Finance Secretary in an interview with News 9. He is also Director of the Office of Management and Enterprise Services (OMES) and went from $108,000 to $171,000 before the hiring freeze.
While the public might have thought a “freeze” meant just that, apparently state government leaders did not. Doerflinger oversaw the implementation of the freeze and was named by the governor “to require Cabinet Secretaries to provide him with periodic accountings of approvals and disapprovals of requests for exemptions.” In other words, he said the freeze was really meant to add another layer of scrutiny to personnel decisions, especially those with the potential to impact the budget.
Doerflinger said the freeze covered not only hiring but transfers, reinstatements, promotions, market adjustments and other mechanisms for adjusting a state worker’s pay.
“The executive order on state employees pay raises and employment was not meant to halt government,” said Gov. Fallin in an interview with News 9. “It was meant to give us a better system.”
In defending the process, Gov. Fallin said the number of personnel actions in 2014 totaled nearly 22,000 but under the 2015 “freeze”, the number had been cut to more than 13,000. About 8,000 of those raises were mandated by the Legislature for Corrections workers, nurses and others.
“That sounds like there wasn’t much of a freeze at all,” said David Blatt, executive director of the Oklahoma Policy Institute. “It seems like the announcement was made to send a signal to the public that the governor was taking action and that, for whatever reason,in practice, not much has changed.”
If there’s one state official upset about it, it is Gary Jones, the State Auditor and Inspector.
“If we find ourself in a hole, we gotta quit digging,” he said. “You gotta start loking at ways to save money.”
Jones said some of the raises might have been warranted, but others involved raising the top pay of some workers anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000 to $30,000.
“Some are just outrageous,” he added. “But you gotta question whether it’s a good use of public funds at this time when we’re concerned about being able to fund public services.”
See Alex Cameron’s report.
News 9
