Division of Highways employees will have to wait longer for the state Personnel Board to vote on the long-delayed revision of the pay plan. This union has a longstanding mass grievance against the DOH concerning this issue, with more than 400 grievants represented.
Last week, the state Personnel Board delayed a vote on the proposed pay plan for at least another month. In June, the board asked the Division of Personnel to put together a committee to review the 700-page plan.
“We’d like additional time to prepare a proper report,” DOH director Sheryl Webb told the Charleston Gazette-Mail recently. She said the committee has submitted 17 requests to the DOH for clarifications about the plan, and some of those requests had come in as recently as last Wednesday.
The delay is the latest development in what has been a more than three-year wait for the DOH to follow legislation passed in 2017 that mandates a comprehensive, more competitive pay plan. Last month, DOH officials unveiled a plan for a points-based job classification system, a plan that includes incremental pay raises over 10 years, with the goal of leveling out discrepancies in pay among similar employee classifications.