Salary raises to $100K proposed for county clerk, auditor and assessor

SOUTH BEND — St. Joseph County officials are seeking to raise the annual salaries for the auditor, assessor and clerk to $100,000 each.

The measure will come to the county council at its meeting at 6 p.m. July 11.

In proposing the raises, council member Randall Figg said he looked at the county’s three largest departments, focusing on the positions rather than the people occupying them.

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Assessor Michael Castellon currently makes $65,000 per year. Auditor John Murphy and Clerk Amy Rolfes each make $70,000.

All are elected officials in the first year of their terms. If approved, the new salaries would be retroactive to July 1.

Council member Diana Hess said she’s felt for several years that the three positions should be paid more, but she questioned why their salaries should all be raised to the same level. And rather than $100,000, she and fellow councilor Mark Catanzarite said they preferred to see it a “little lower,” speaking in the June 27 meeting of the council’s budget and administration committee.

Catanzarite said he’s felt the positions deserved more, but historically the officials in those jobs have often passed up a raise or instead wanted to boost their employees’ salaries.

Comparing salaries with other counties

Castellon argued to the council committee that $100,000 puts his salary more in line with other county assessors across Indiana, contrasting it with Elkhart County’s assessor at $95,000, Allen County’s assessor at $102,000 and Hamilton County’s assessor at $122,236.

Both the clerk’s and auditor’s positions also contrast similarly with their counterparts, who earn in the mid-$90,000s in Elkhart and Allen counties and in the mid $130,000s in Hamilton County, according to data that Murphy prepared. The salaries of all public employees in Indiana can be searched via gateway.ifionline.org.

Murphy said the auditor’s job is comparable to South Bend’s comptroller, paid $129,198.

In 2022, Murphy earned $10,000 more as the county’s chief deputy auditor than he does now as auditor. He knew he was stepping into a pay cut when he entered last fall’s elections but said, “I wanted to run anyway to accomplish some things as auditor.”

Castellon pointed out that the assessor is tasked with doing reassessments, noting, “There’s only 19 counties that do reassessments in house.”

When asked, Castellon said the in-house reassessment “absolutely” saves money because it would otherwise cost “millions” to have an outside vendor do it.

He also said that, unlike assessors elsewhere, he doesn’t receive extra money for serving on county boards — he serves on two.

Hess pointed out that the clerk gets a per diem to sit on the county’s election board.

Rolfes, the clerk, is in the midst of overseeing her department as it absorbs the duties of the county’s former board of voter registration, a move that county officials approved in January.

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“All three people do a great job,” councilor Amy Drake said, echoing the praise from fellow council members. “I’m impressed with all of them and would like to see all of them brought up to a more decent level that they deserve, whatever that may be.”

Looking to the future, councilor Joe Thomas said that the county positions need the higher salaries, saying: “The competition of us (government) against private enterprise has never been any more fierce. And I don’t think it’s ever going away.”

Council to vote on health reorganization

Also at the July 11 meeting, the council will vote on the county health department’s reorganizational chart that would, among other things, eliminate the deputy health officer, Dr. Mark Fox, once the new health officer, Dr. Diana Purushotham, begins work on July 24.

The county health board had approved it, with member Ellen Reilander arguing that the deputy health officer’s position had to be removed to help finance the expanded salary of $250,000 that was offered to the new health officer.

But Hess echoed the concern that board member Heidi Beidinger had raised that, if Fox goes, the department would lose the continuity of his expertise, especially because the department recently saw at least seven employees resign. Likewise, Rose Meissner, the president of the Community Foundation of St. Joseph County, had said at a recent forum that the loss of expertise posed a challenge for the county to make full use of boosted funding that it could receive from the state through the new Health First Indiana program.

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Hess said she would never have voted to approve the $250,000 salary for the health officer if she’d known that it meant losing Fox, who was the point person for the department’s response to the pandemic.

But council member Dan Schaetzle said the department still has the “institutional knowledge” of other long-time staff members.

The health department’s attorney, Marcel Lebbin, said that the department has gone this low on employees and that the positions will be filled.

“What we are losing isn’t as dire as you make it out to be,” he said.

South Bend Tribune reporter Joseph Dits can be reached at 574-235-6158 or jdits@sbtinfo.com.

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Salary raises proposed St. Joseph County clerk auditor and assessor