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all right members if you guys want to go ahead and take your seats we're
about to start this meeting all right i'm calling this meeting to order thank you all for being here today i think we've got a lot of new faces on personnel so um we've got a little 101 today for us to make sure everybody's on the same page and we're kind of starting from a foundation um but before we jump
into any presentations um i need a motion for the adoption of the subcommittee rules we've got a motion in a second any discussion all those in favor please say aye opposed no motion carries all right at this time we will do we will have a presentation from the Office of Personnel Management, OPM, which we'll hear a lot. Kay Barnhill, if you would please introduce yourself for the record. Yes, ma'am. Thank you,
Speaker 37
4:56
Chairman Davis. I am Kay Barnhill. I'm the director of the Office of Personnel Management, which is located in the
Department of Transformation and Shared Services. And what Tony has asked me to do this morning is give y'all an overview of kind of our relationship and what we bring to you and what we may do in house so i've got a little handout here as exhibit c that kind of summarizes what we do the office personnel management is composed of four major sections the classification and compensation section which is the section that does a lot of the work we bring to your attention the payroll section we run payroll for 28,000 state employees we have the training and outreach
system which trains employees across state government on various classes and then most importantly we also have the technical ACES system for the HR management team which takes everything that's done in here and done in our office and we enter it into the system for to make sure
Speaker 36
5:58
everything goes correctly. So a little bit of history agencies or departments submit their request to OPM prior to us bringing anything over here to y'all. So the reason those requests
come to OPM is to ensure that the executive review has been completed on those requests and we are all in agreement. Once the executive review and we're finished, we then bring these items to you. Some of those items include pool position requests, what we call compensation differentials special entry rates special compensation plans position reassignments it's a new one that came in with act 499 performance evaluation changes miscellaneous
federal grants and of course pay plan development now i'm going to go into each of these a little bit more in just a minute but it's that's basically summarizes everything we bring to you And within the Pay Plan Act, or in Act 499 as it is this year, we have three different types of pools. And a pool is additional positions that agencies or departments can access when there's some unanticipated program that they need to administer or implement. So it's the only way departments can truly get new positions unless that goes through the miscellaneous federal grant project.
The surrender pool is when the agency gives up positions. They say, we don't need these three positions any longer, but we want this one generally higher-graded position that they're requesting at that time. The growth pool, agencies are not required to surrender anything. They're just saying this is a new position that we can cover. Now, we don't give additional funding for growth pool positions. They have to cover that within their existing budget, but they can get a new position established.
And the transition pool is generally used in the case of retirements when you have a senior leader or an important player on your team that's getting ready to leave and you need to train somebody and a transition pool position only lasts for six months. So that is a very temporary pool. New title requests, as mentioned here, are when agencies come forth and say we look at all the titles that are in the current system, but we don't find one that matches what we need we're not anticipating a lot of new titles over
this next year since we just completed the pay plan study um and we've retitled all positions there may be some coming in the june meeting that we've already discovered that we might have missed but we'll bring those forward in june but after that i don't expect there will be many new titles at that time. So differentials. Differentials are when a department requests, hey, I want to pay extra. A classic example is we've got an accountant, but they're also a CPA. And so that CPA is worth
an additional 10% to our department, and we want to be able to reward that accountant for having their CPA. That's a typical what we call certification differential. There's also other type differentials, which could be in education. Sometimes there have been geographic differentials when there's different areas of the state. Sometimes, like Northwest Arkansas is booming, we sometimes need a geographic differential there because their rates, salary rates are higher. We're Southeast Arkansas. We sometimes need a differential rate there because we don't have
the labor pool to attract from that we do in other places. So those are examples of differentials. for your information all differentials are going to expire this year on june 28th before the pay plan is implemented departments are coming forth to re-request those differentials in light of the new pay grades and the new titles that we've assigned their positions so we may not be continuing a lot of differentials we've had in the past but we will be reviewing those requests
and will bring those forward for your June Personnel Committee meeting. So we bring those to you. Those do require your approval. A department cannot use a differential that has not been approved by the Personnel Committee or Legislative Council. Other things OPM does, a department will bring forth, and they will ask for a special rate of pay. There's two types of special rates of pay. One is called an exceptionally well-qualified applicant. that's where the individual you're hiring has qualifications that far exceed what are minimally
established for that position those people they come forth and they said we need to pay this person extra because they're going to be able to hit the ground running and they already know all this and we consider them exceptionally well qualified a lot of times that's used in areas like information technology when we're hiring information tech officials from other places they bring a lot of special skills the other type of special entry rates we have are what we call labor market rates and that's where opm has reviewed the labor market and found that our
assignment for grade or salary range for a particular position is lacking now we're hoping not to have many of those come this next year because that's what the whole pay plan was about it was totally labor market based and it was based on the data that we were able to collect But I did want you to know, before we bring anything like that to you, we have done our research. We participate in surveys from other states, our own state. We use salary.com. We look at Arkansas rates predominantly because most of our rates for our positions are generally Arkansas-based.
So we compare with Arkansas hospitals and industry as well as other cities and information, things like that. Also recently, last year, we established a special compensation plan. And a special compensation plan was established in order to help us with some recruiting and also to reward people that take on additional responsibilities on top of their job.
This allows an agency can request. We don't do this for everybody. and right now I think there's three maybe four special compensation plans in effect so it's not widely used at this time but the department can request to have a special compensation plan we do one for nurses that's one I can tell you right now so that nurses can receive a five thousand dollar bonus generally when they agree to come work for the state that is small compared to what I believe some of the other hospitals are paying up to twenty thousand dollars in bonuses
But $5,000 is the maximum we can actually do. The department comes to OPM. We work with them to determine how those awards will be implemented. We confirm that it's objective criteria, measurable standards. A lot of times it might be for a short-term project where additional work is signed to employees that are already doing their daily work, and we ask them to take on a special project that is something else. um we also determine the payout process again this means sometimes they give the bonus all at
once and a five thousand dollar payment sometimes it's a twenty five hundred dollar payment for the first six months and another twenty five hundred dollars for the second six months all these special compensation plans are reviewed by the personnel committee we bring them to you and you either approve them or disapprove and we've had some go both ways over the past year so um it certainly has to meet your discretion and your scrutiny before we actually implement those plans. Position reassignment is something new that came in with Act 499 this year, the new Pay
Plan Act. This does allow departments to come forth and ask that they transfer positions from one business area within their department to another business area. So if DFA wanted to transfer a position from revenue to DFA management services, that request would have to come over here for your review. Again, there's no additional funding involved. The departments have to be able to fund these transfers, and they are limited to no more than 5% of their total appropriation
for these positions. So there is a cap. This can only happen four times a year. It's new. We don't anticipate that we'll be doing that. We're hoping we corrected a lot of these issues during the last session when we transferred positions from one business area to another. Another thing, and this is something we're involved in right now, and you might hear from your constituents, is the performance evaluation process. OPM designs a performance evaluation system, which is how we determine what merit pay employees are to receive.
Speaker 37
14:56
uh we recently year last year we changed from five categories of performance to four categories of performance all state employees are evaluated on this particular system it's generated through our aces system we add it back into the system and it determines what compensation they receive last year for example in 24 the governor is allowed to make the determination of what percentage you get for each category.
I think the governor last year gave 3% to employees who exceeded standards and 1% to employees who were meeting
Speaker 36
15:34
expectations. But this is done every May, and then the final determination of what percentages are awarded is in
Speaker 36
15:48
miscellaneous federal grants. those originate from the department and are forwarded to the office of budget if there are any positions involved with these we call them mfgs for miscellaneous federal grant
but if there are any positions involved with that we review to make sure that we're assigning the appropriate classification and salary range with their grades so that is what opm does with those and as some of you may recall we did go through a major pay plan development this last session that's where uh we actually went in and used all the information we could find some of it i mentioned earlier various salary survey tools we looked at job descriptions we looked at organizational charts
within the departments and reassigned all all job titles to new job titles we reduced from uh over 2200 and 500 to 800 approximately 800 titles now i think it's what we ended up at the end of that so we've assigned new titles we're in the process right now of writing the new job descriptions we're sending those out to the departments because they are the subject matter experts for them to give us some guidance and what they think those minimum qualifications should be we want to make
sure we've got these right and they will all be new and ready for implementation on july 1 of this year the pay plan that as a result of this pay plan study last year will go into effect june 29th of this year because the payout actually comes the first week of july when the new that that plan falls in the cycle of the first pay period for the new fiscal year so the pay plan will actually be implemented june 29th merit increases will be implemented
June 22nd so those are dates if your employees contact you that is something we'll be doing I believe that's it if you have any questions I'll be happy to answer any questions about OPM or anything you would like to know at this time
Representative Ray you are recognized in just a second thank you
Representative David Ray
Unverified
18:17
madam chair and thank you miss barnhill for your comments in your presentation so i have
uh two quick questions yes sir one how many approximately how many um open positions in state government do we have at the moment? Generally, we
Speaker 36
18:33
have, I believe, about 26,000 positions authorized, and about 20 to 7 of those are filled at the moment. That changes on a daily basis, and we do track that. Okay, you said 22,700? Yes, sir. I think that's the latest number that we actually had, a full-time regular employee. That doesn't include colleges and institutions
are what we call extra
Representative David Ray
Unverified
18:58
health employees. Right, okay. And then when someone
applies for a state position online, my understanding is they get an email at some point that lets them know if they've met the minimum qualifications for the position. Yes, sir. Okay. Yes, sir. Who is it that determines whether or not an applicant has met the minimum qualifications? I guess I'm wondering, is it done by a person?
Is it done by AI? How is
Speaker 36
19:28
that done? At the current time, it is done at the individual department for where the job is located. They have what we call screeners who review the applicant's qualifications as compared to the minimum qualifications for the position. um that's a process we're entering in right now and updating our online system to advertise jobs and looking just to make sure that's the most efficient way for that to be happening at this point in time okay so there's
Representative David Ray
Unverified
19:55
a screener in each agency yes sir at this time it makes that
determination okay thank you all right representative lady men you are recognized well there
Representative Jack Ladyman
Unverified
20:14
you go there you go thank you thank you madam chair uh over here yes uh i had a question you talked about the uh labor market rates yes sir and uh you talked about this a little bit i know dhs has some i think
you mentioned the nurses but uh do you look at regional rates
And I think the nurses is a good example of this because, like, we looked at the DHS nurses, and they have trouble getting those nurses in areas like Jonesboro and Conway because of the competition from the hospitals that are close proximity. Right. So do you look at that maybe for the same job in northwest Arkansas you might have to get paid more than in southeast? Yes, we
Speaker 36
20:59
do look at that. We look at the metropolitan areas around the state to see. I mean, there's sometimes different rates prevailing in Jonesboro as opposed to Fayetteville or Little Rock, as you just said.
But we collect all that data. We can do it regionally by state. We can do it regionally by many states surrounding us at that time. But we try to address it in that fashion. I think you'll see the nurses received a pretty significant upgrade with this pay plan. I'm talking off the top of my head, and that's not always the smartest thing. Well, the nurse
Representative Jack Ladyman
Unverified
21:33
is just a good example because there's a great difference in what nurses gain in certain parts of the state,
but I'm sure that's probably true with accounting and engineering and other skills. So many factors
Speaker 36
21:45
determined on the labor pool of what's available. And, you know, we do try to recruit. We're enhancing our recruitment efforts because we want to have new people coming into state government right now. We feel like this pay plan that we are putting into place in June will make a significant difference because the starting rates for those jobs have all gone up pretty much considerably. I think a nurse went, just as an example,
so you'll see what we're talking about, I think a nurse went from 68, and in our new plan, entry nurse is going to be 75. So we at least added, you know, considerable salary. One
Representative Jack Ladyman
Unverified
22:22
more question, if you don't mind, Madam Chair. Do you know, I mean, I know nurses, we have a problem because there's a shortage, are there other skilled areas that you have trouble with? Do you know what those are?
Speaker 36
22:36
Yes, sir. We targeted it. We asked each department to give us their target classifications,
what jobs they had the most trouble with. That included law enforcement positions, of course, at corrections. It included correctional officers. It included family service workers at DHS who they have a lot of trouble with. But we listened to accountants was one, fiscal positions right now. There seems to be a shortage of fiscal expertise, in particular fiscal expertise as it relates to the state of Arkansas accounting rules. So those are
Speaker 37
23:09
just examples. Lawyers, we were losing attorneys pretty quickly.
We could hire them that get their experience and immediately go somewhere else. So these kind of positions were identified by the various departments, and we certainly concentrated on those while doing this recent pay
plan study. Thank you. representative Wooten you are recognized as soon as your mic turns there seems to be a little delay
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
23:41
today there you go thank you madam chairman uh miss Cahill a good report in the briefing on
on what y'all do at OPM my question has to do with the performance evaluation yes Is that based on exceeding, you used the word standard, exceeding the standard? Is that the job description? You mentioned that each agency has been asked to provide you with a job description. Will that be compared to what they're requesting a performance evaluation payment on?
Speaker 53
24:17
Okay. What they are generally requesting performance
Speaker 37
24:21
evaluation payments on are various standards that have been established that may go across many jobs. One of them is accountability. One of them is job knowledge and skills. I think we have initiative is
Speaker 36
24:35
one. Customer service is another standard. So we have set
Speaker 37
24:40
standards that departments can determine what they want their jobs to be evaluated against because all jobs may not include customer service,
but certainly at the revenue department that's a very important aspect of their position. The departments have the leeway to determine I'm going to rate all my jobs or I'm going to rate all jobs in this classification by these standards. And so that's what happens there. We have four categories that employees can fall into. That includes unacceptable, which generally we advise that those employees not be kept around most times. Needs improvement, those employees that may still have a lot of learning,
you think they have potential, but they're not there yet. Meeting expectations is where a lot of employees fall, and the other large number of employees fall into the exceeding expectation and exceeding standards, which were
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
25:36
the ones I just mentioned. So we're giving them performance evaluation, but now if we give them performance evaluation pay as an incentive for doing a good job, they have exceeded the standards.
Speaker 37
25:54
Last year we awarded performance pay, like I said, 3% to those exceeding standards, 1% to those that were meeting expectations at that time. Thank you.
Speaker 77
26:04
Thank you, Madam Chairman. representative richardson
you are recognized in just a minute thank you madam
Chair
Unverified
26:17
chair uh how are you today well thank you
Representative R. Scott Richardson
Unverified
26:21
so my question around the performance evaluations that you that you're
talking about is there an anticipated increase in cost based on the evaluations that will be coming out in this in this next uh fiscal year or june whenever it takes effect based on what your budget is are you anticipating that to rise based on evaluations being made that exceed yes what we do once the evaluation process is finished
Speaker 36
26:52
i think the deadline is may 21st and the agencies have to be satisfied with everything by next week
once that is done we begin costing how much those percentages would cost if we do different scenarios we may try a half percent one percent or we may go you know from one to five to say if we gave everybody that scored you know meets expectations this and we gave everybody else but yes we do cost those out and we do anticipate them increasing the budget for those particular We don't give them additional funds because generally they pay for that through salary savings.
Representative R. Scott Richardson
Unverified
27:29
But we do anticipate that that will rise. And then the final thing, so when an evaluation is done by a member of management to their frontline staff, the approval comes to the secretary, or who
Speaker 36
27:47
ultimately approves those increases? Generally, the secretary is held accountable for the increases. Some secretaries choose to use a committee approach where they may have a performance evaluation committee established that reviews all the evaluations.
Because it is kind of tricky, and you need to make sure you're being consistent across all your sections. You don't want one section getting all the raises and another section not getting any. So that is the secretary's responsibility to look at
Representative R. Scott Richardson
Unverified
28:18
sure things are distributed accordingly. Okay, and then last question is on the – when we redid the pay scale and you moved different people from whatever, Class A to Class C or whatever, do you have any anticipation of any changes being made to what was already put in place
due to that act of the new pay plan? Do you anticipate some people being miscategorized and having to come back and change? We have heard from some departments.
Speaker 40
28:42
We have met with the departments three or four times going over our final results.
Speaker 36
28:46
Some, I do feel like we may have missed something, and we'll be bringing those forward to personal committee in June. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much. Representative Ennett, you're recognized. Thank you, Chairwoman.
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
29:07
Hi. Hi. I remember talking to you last year, end of last year, about the Arkansas Rehabilitation. Yes, ma'am. Is it Commissioner Services? I think it's Services. It's Rehabilitation
Commission, I think. Part of
Commerce, part of the Department of Commerce. Yes. Right. And I remember discussing with you that it was a
lot of open positions there. will
this help recruit more people to this commission to help with their mission to help
Speaker 36
29:39
people with disabilities we anticipate oh I'm sorry I know excuse me I didn't mean to cut you off we anticipate that it will make a big difference we move some of those rehab counselors to the medical pay schedule since those jobs tend to have more relation to those type of functions I think they're going to, again, off the top of my head, either a four or a five, which is a considerable jump. I believe they start in the 40s now, and we're looking at the 60s for the future.
So I think they will have a better chance of bringing people in. Thank you. All
right, do we have any other questions? All right, seeing none, I am going to ask Mr. Nick Fuller to come up and just kind of talk about how higher ed is a little bit different, just so we have a general understanding of how the institutions work. Thank you.
Speaker 100
30:49
Nick Fuller, I'm the Assistant Commissioner for the Division of Higher Ed, and I'll make this very brief.
Nick Fuller
Unverified
30:54
If it's just bouncing off of what Kay's done, because we're very similar to what OPM does for the institution is just kind of scaled down on the level of what impact we have as we allow more autonomy to the institutional systems to do their own things. But we do have the same central pool that will come before you and surrender pools for positions from the institutions that will be brought for approval. the biggest difference you'll see on institution positions compared to the state employees is they
have a classification compensation system so there's graded titles and levels all the institutions have line item maximum positions so there's not going to be a grade and a category for what class code they have they're all set at a maximum salary that the position title can receive and each system or institution can set what the floor of the entry of that position is going to be they just can't exceed the maximum that you all approve so that's the biggest difference other than if you're talking about an institution we talk about bringing new positions no institution
has state revenue that's given to them based on a position at any point when we go through the legislative process anything when they're asking positions asking for new positions we don't dedicate any state revenue for any specific position all of their state funding allocated through the productivity model. So you'll notice if they come asking for new, there's not going to be any state revenue tied to that specifically. The other item would be, if you look at the amount of authorized positions we have, we have probably closer to 10,000
vacant positions as opposed to 4,000 at the state employee level. The difference there is if they're budgeted, we don't pay insurance on the vacant positions on the institution level where the state has been doing that so we keep a lot of the and the majority of those are going to be in the faculty positions so the institution can be responsive if they have a larger enrollment they can set up a new class if they have a new program needs to get started they have the flexibility to come without having to come ask you all for 20 30 new faculty at a time that's the reason we carry such a larger amount of vacant positions and the only other item that you'll see
that we'll bring to you each month is a provisional positions report it's going to be very similar to the miscellaneous federal grant positions that Kay brings from the state employees. The only difference that we have is ours might be federally funded through grants. They might be private grants that an institution receives, any other kind of outside funding source that they receive on a one-time basis. That comes to our office. We approve, but we have to bring it to you to show you what that source of revenue, what it's going to be for, and you review it before they can fill that position.
we do approve it at adhe but you have to review that report each month so it'll be at the end of your agenda probably every month on the provisional positions and those are again the type that if the funding goes away the position goes
away whenever that funding is gone so that's a brief history what dhe does thank you we do have a few questions for you
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
34:03
representative wooten you are recognized for a question just as soon as it turns green thank you madam chair Mr. Fuller, on how many positions throughout the systems, both ASU and the university and the ones that are outside the
Speaker 108
34:18
system, how many positions are you authorized?
We're a little over 38,000 total across all 33 institutions. 38,000. 38,000. Yes, sir. Of the 38,000, how many are vacant? Around 10,000 of those. We have about 28,000 field
Speaker 109
34:37
positions. About 2,000. About 28,000 field positions. So there's about
Speaker 108
34:44
10,000 vacant. How many of those are vacant? About 10,000. 10,000 positions. How many of those have been vacant over two years?
Speaker 109
34:56
I do not have that information. I can get that for you.
Nick Fuller
Unverified
35:01
We've been working on that. Yes, sir. Yes, and we do include that and the information when we bring the personnel recommendations during the session. We
Speaker 109
35:07
have a report for that, so I'll pull that and get it to you. That's required at a certain time of the year.
Speaker 108
35:14
Yes, sir, but I'll get that information to you when I get back. You'll get that information. Yes, sir. Of those 2,000 positions, how many of them are budgeted? As I said
Nick Fuller
Unverified
35:25
before, I don't know if they budget any of the vacant ones
up to the point that they need that position filled. They just carry it in the event that they have increased enrollment
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
35:39
or additional need for staff on a majority of them. Okay. And, Ms. Barnhill, how many positions do we have? Following up on Representative Richmond's question, how many positions with 36,000 or 26,000, how many positions do we have in state government?
Speaker 36
35:59
Yes, we have approximately 26,000 authorized and about 22,700 filled right now. So we've got about 4,000 vacant positions. And
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
36:06
some of those are budgeted and some are not budgeted.
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
36:11
Do we have how many 7,800 positions? Do you remember? I
Speaker 70
36:16
was trying to see if we had the number that
Speaker 37
36:21
had been vacant for two years. she's going
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
36:32
all right yeah so when when is that report due
Speaker 116
36:38
it's due over here june 15th june 15th
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
36:41
we'll bring it actually to the june so are they filing those reports now yes we're getting prepared to present them yes we've already sent out
Speaker 36
36:49
to the departments all the positions that we've identified as being vacant for two years or more and
Speaker 37
36:55
they're responding to us now to say whether they need to keep them or don't need those positions
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
37:02
in the future. Follow-up for May. During the last session or before the last session,
we had a meeting and ALC approved the holding of those positions that were vacant over two years because of the fact that the contributions have been made to the employee benefits section. Yes, sir. Do you anticipate a resolution to that situation, or have you heard of any consideration as to how to handle that funding phantom,
what I call phantom employees? I
Speaker 37
37:47
speak. Mr. Wallace of EBD and our secretary, Secretary Fiskin, have both mentioned that we need to review how we fund our employee insurance program. I don't know how quickly that will come forward, but I know that we're studying and looking at
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
38:03
alternatives now. Because I think we need to address that because it's just going to continue to grow. With each year they submit the report, we're going to have to hold if we don't come up with some reconciliation relative to how we fund that employee benefit.
Right. And it's not going to cost us any more money than it's costing us now. It's just where is the money going to come from, as I understand. Is that correct? Yes, sir. That's my understanding as well. My greatest worry is that 796 is going to be, unfortunately, impacted, and it needs to be addressed. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chairman. Thank you.
Senator Hill, you're recognized for a question? Thank you, Madam Chairman.
Senator Ricky Hill
Unverified
38:50
Thank you, Madam Chair. How is the University of Arkansas Extension Office salaries funded? And do we foresee any mechanism to get their salaries competitive? So the Division of Agriculture?
Nick Fuller
Unverified
39:06
Yes. They are funded through various funding sources, but they do receive, I think it's around $60 million in state general revenue. through their non-formula program they're not part of the productivity funding model but they have their own line item within the Revenue
Stabilization Act to receive funding and then they also receive other federal grants and things to help support those
Senator Ricky Hill
Unverified
39:30
okay so they're separate they're separate from the rest of the U of IE
Chair
Unverified
39:41
is that correct yes sir okay thank
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
39:48
you any other questions uh representative witten you're recognized madam chairman thank you uh one one question for both of you on these federal positions do or is it made clear to the applicants for the
positions that if the federal money goes away, the position goes away? Because I'm concerned about that relative to the fact of the federal money that's being pulled out of the state right now and where we would be in relation to the people we employ. In state departments,
Speaker 37
40:21
state agencies, yes. They are notified, applicants are notified before they accept the job that this is a federally funded position and if the
funding goes away there's not a guarantee and they probably won't be taken over by state resources they're notified it
Speaker 109
40:36
was they're applying and when they're accepting the position thank you madam chairman thank you for permitting me to ask that question
absolutely and are there any other questions uh seeing none i'm going to turn it over to mr bart
angel for items d and e thank you madam chair
Speaker 125
40:59
item d is a reference guide that provides history and some code references and
details the type of actions and requests that we typically see here in personnel it has been updated to include the changes made by act 499 which is the class and compact it'll be in your member folders uh each meeting starting next month you'll have a typical manila file folder at your desk this will be uh in there the reference guide as well as the pay tables and it can grow as we see need for put things in there but it'll be at your desk every month starting next month and item e is a brief summary of the changes that were made through act 499
some of the high points and k touched on several of these establishes the new pay grade tables These, again, are not tied to the previous tables at all. If someone is at a GS08 currently and they go to a SGS7, say, they're not taking a demotion or a pay cut. It's just completely different and unrelated, even though it would appear that 7 is a smaller number than 8, but they're not going down in pay or demotion. The number of job titles was cut from 2,500 to 850. It created job series and job families for employees to have a career path.
the accountant that Kay mentioned is a good example it allows with approval by personnel and ALC the departments to move positions from one position to another it's a reallocation resources again Kay touched on that it reduces the SWAT pool numbers from 1,500 to 500 and the growth pool from 500 to 250 and those are the high points for item E in the summary madam chair okay are there
any questions or comments on that all right seeing none we can go
on to item F all right item F thinking madam chair item
Speaker 125
42:53
F is an action item for today and it does require a motion it's a request from the Department of Public Safety to adjust their special compensation and recruitment incentives plan specifically their hiring bonus policy they're asking to be able to allow their employees who leave before they've completed their one year of service to pay back the bonus they received on a pro rata basis they would like to make this request retroactive back to the original approval date of
last November 15th it's 11 15 2024 and OPM has recommended the change to the plan
all right I'm seeing no questions I have a
motion do I have a second yes a second any discussion all those in favor please say aye opposed no motion carries all right and seeing no other business this meeting is adjourned
Agenda
A. Call to Order
B. Adoption of Subcommittee Rules
C. Presentation by Office of Personnel Management (Kay Barnhill)
D. Reference Guide for The Uniform Personnel Classification and Compensation Plan
E. Act 499 Pay Plan Summary
Regular Business:
F. Request from Department of Public Safety, Division of Arkansas State Crime Lab for a revision to administer special compensation awards and recruitment incentives. Ark. Code Ann. §21-5-227 and §21-5-228. (Mike Hagar, Secretary)
G. Other business
H. Adjournment
Documents
| Title | Type | Pages | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agenda — ALC - PERSONNEL, May 20, 2025 | Agenda | 1 | Official source ↗ |
| Ex B Personnel Subcommittee Rules_2025 | Exhibit | 1 | Official source ↗ |
| Ex C OPM and the Personnel Subcommittee | Exhibit | 12 | Official source ↗ |
| Ex D 2025-2026 Personnel Reference Guide for State Depts and Agencies | Exhibit | 20 | Official source ↗ |
| Ex E Act 499 Pay Plan Summary | Exhibit | 2 | Official source ↗ |
| Ex F Crime Lab REVISED Spec Comp Awards Plan | Exhibit | 3 | Official source ↗ |
Speakers
Speaker 1
Speaker 3
Speaker 13
Speaker 22
Speaker 25
Speaker 27
Speaker 28
Senator Breanne Davis Chair
Unverified
Speaker 37
Speaker 36
Representative David Ray
Unverified
Representative Jack Ladyman
Unverified
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
Speaker 53
Speaker 40
Speaker 77
Chair
Unverified
Representative R. Scott Richardson
Unverified
Speaker 73
Representative Denise Jones Ennett
Unverified
Speaker 100
Nick Fuller
Unverified
Speaker 108
Speaker 109
Speaker 70
Speaker 74
Speaker 116
Senator Ricky Hill
Unverified
Speaker 125