CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Kleberg County Sheriff Richard Kirkpatrick is hoping that County Commissioner's sign off on a deal to give a number of his employees pay raises.
The Kleberg County Sheriff's office has been struggling for several years now to try and hire and retain jailers, which is also a problem across the state. So, County Commissioner's took a look at a proposal on Wednesday afternoon that would raise starting pay to $20 an hour.
"We really had to come up and do something to support our staff," Kirkpatrick said. "Let our staff know that we support them and we have to be able to retain these employees and those kinds of things. So for those reasons that's why we chose to do what we did."
In a four-to-one vote, commissioners agreed to raise the starting pay.
Commissioner David Rosse voted against it and he said he only did that because he is never going to approve pay raises for any employees in the middle of a budget year.
"It's time we become proactive and start paying them for what they're worth," said Kleberg County Judge Rudy Madrid. "We just teamed up with Workforce Solutions and had a huge job fair. We had about 50 applicants come in, we've got two more job fairs coming down the pipeline here in the near future."
Jailers and deputies will receive pay raises. The money will come from various budgeted, but unfilled positions at the sheriff's department.
"As time has progressed from our last budget year we've had a lot of unfilled positions," Kirkpatrick said. "So again, getting in genius and figuring out where we're going to get this money from really comes from her own budget, because we've had unfilled positions."
The $20 an hour starting salary begins July 10. All other sheriff's employees who are part of the Sheriff's Officers Association's collective-bargaining will receive a 3% increase on Oct, 1.
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