Carbon County salaries continue to be a contentious issue.

On Thursday, Jim Thorpe resident Jerry Hoare told the commissioners that he feels they should be “embarrassed” by the way they compensate county employees.

“You owe the employees a living wage,” Hoare said. “You have a responsibility to the employees. You’re the reason why unions are desperately needed in this county.”

Commissioner Rocky Ahner, who has been vocal about the need to fix the salaries to provide better pay to employees, said that he is embarrassed to pay somebody $11.38 per hour.

“I’m trying to work on it, doing my own study and when this (salary) study comes back, I want to compare it with that and try to be fair to everybody,” Ahner said. “Hopefully we work these things out and that it doesn’t get out of control.”

Ahner noted that it will be trying to find a balance between making fair wages and the cost to taxpayers.

“It’s going to take months for us to revolve this,” Ahner added. “It’s going to be looking at the total budget ... and it comes down to what the taxpayers can afford.”

Commissioner Chris Lukasevich said that while he is not embarrassed by any position he has taken, there is a process that they must work through as a board to salaries and how they are managed.

Carbon County has been waiting on the results of a salary study from Evergreen Solutions LLC of Tallahassee, Florida. The county hired the company in July 2021 at a cost of $48,000.

The goal of the study was to look at the positions of the over 300 employees and determine a proper compensation scale across all departments for the same type of positions. The county has 16 levels for salaries for nonsupervisory positions and about 21 levels for supervisory.

On Thursday, Commissioners’ Chairman Wayne Nothstein said the county has received some preliminary numbers but are still waiting on the full report.

The board has also reached out to some counties that have not responded to requests for their salaries so that Carbon can do a complete comparison.

“We’re still gathering some information,” Nothstein said.

The last study of employee salary rates was adopted in the 1990s, and since then, the system has been piece-mealed because positions evolved and more and more titles were created.

It came to a head in the beginning of September when row officers squared off against the salary board in an attempt to get 6% raises for their departments.

Those motions, which mostly passed 3-2, were reversed the following week by the board of commissioners 2-1, which cited a court case out of Monroe that didn’t allow a motion to be set that would spend above an adopted budget.