By city’s own standards, pay rate fails to measure up

A city employee took a pay cut from her former role as assistant manager at a White Castle restaurant for a job in the Marion County Clerk’s Office, where salaries start at about $31,750.

That’s one example Marion County Clerk Kate Sweeney Bell says illustrates that low pay is a challenge facing her agency. A $31,750 salary breaks down to less than $17 per hour for a full-time employee (37.5 hours per week).

“I know that if we could pay people more, we would, because the work that they do is vital to our operation as a community,” Bell told IBJ. “But if the money’s not there, you can’t pay them more.”

Across Indianapolis city-county government, 166 employees earn less than $18 an hour, the benchmark that some groups consider a living wage, including the city’s economic development arm, which four years ago set $18 as the minimum hourly wage for companies seeking city incentives.

The city’s lowest-paid employees are often some of the most public-facing. They include customer service workers in areas like the Mayor’s Action Center, which fields call-in complaints from Marion County residents about every government service.

The Hogsett administration says those 166 employees represent just 2% of the city’s full-time workforce of 6,850 people.

City spokeswoman Aliya Wishner said city employees also receive handsome benefit packages, like health insurance, a pension plan, 22 days of paid time off for new employees (with increases up to 37 days by 15 years of employment) and 15 paid holidays. And the administration has increased wages in recent years, she said.

Still, one city-county councilor is raising the alarm. District 13 councilor Jesse Brown, a Democrat serving his first term, said the city should hold itself to the same standards it holds private employers. He voted against Hogsett’s proposed 2025 budget in part because some city employees aren’t paid a living wage, he said.

Brown said that he hasn’t found co-sponsors for a proposal to increase pay for city workers and that the change should come from the Mayor’s Office. State lawmakers have been known to interfere with council proposals, he said, and might work against a proposal to increase city employee pay to $18 an hour.

That benchmark was set by a Central Indiana Corporate Partnership and Brookings Institute 2018 report that determined $18 an hour, paired with health benefits, was the living wage in Indianapolis.

Based on that report, Develop Indy, the city’s economic development arm, in 2020 announced a change in its project strategy. Rather than focusing on the number of jobs an economic development deal might create, officials now require companies seeking tax abatements to pay employees at least $18 an hour.

“I think we would assume that if the city has passed this … initiative years ago, saying, ‘We don’t do business with companies who pay this low,’ why wouldn’t we be holding ourselves to that standard?” Brown said.

Some city-county department leaders have told Brown their teams are paid poorly, he said. While he declined to name those employees—citing a fear they’d be retaliated against—he said the low wages are concentrated in jobs filled largely by people of color and women.

Data from the city’s Office of Equity, Belonging and Inclusion bears that out. According to a public equity dashboard, nearly 40% of city employees making $15.81 to $19.63 an hour are Black; that increases to 46% for those earning $19.64 to $22.68. Meanwhile, 70% of employees making $30.31 to $47.99 and above $48 an hour are white.

Patty Morris, chief deputy for Marion County Auditor Myla Eldridge, told IBJ that jobs in her office pay $17.51 to $49 an hour. When interviewing candidates, she said, she emphasizes the city’s strong benefits package, plus additional perks like free parking, a free bus pass and discounts to local hotels.

Working for the city “has a lot of perks, and that keeps me here, too,” Morris said.

In Milwaukee, which is commonly considered a peer city, the numbers are similar: 2.87% of full-time city employees, 180 employees, make $18 an hour or less, according to city spokeswoman Karleen Cortés.

But in nearby Fishers, which has a smaller workforce at 518 employees, minimum pay for city employees is $20.29 an hour.

While it’s generally accepted that public-sector jobs pay less than private-sector jobs, Brown said the city should keep pace with the cost of living. He pointed to raises for first-year Indianapolis police officers. Starting pay at IMPD has repeatedly increased outside of the union process—a move mostly driven by the high-profile challenge of recruiting officers.

“So, we can do it right,” Brown said. “It’s possible to do this for public-sector employees.”

Andrew Bradley, senior director of policy and strategy for Prosperity Indiana, said state and local officials need to consider the rising cost of living, including housing, when deciding wages for public-sector employees and contractors paid with taxpayer dollars.

“Policymakers must ensure that we invest in public-sector jobs that are economy-boosting, not economy-busting,” Bradley told IBJ in an email.

His organization sets the living wage in Marion County even higher than $18 an hour. It found in a report with the National Low Income Housing Coalition that full-time Hoosier workers need to earn $19 an hour to afford a modest, two-bedroom apartment at fair-market rent. For Marion County specifically, that increases to $20.48 an hour.

Phil Powell, executive director of the Indiana Business Research Center at Indiana University and clinical associate professor of business economics and public policy at the IU Kelley School of Business, said the current economy is seeing wage changes concentrated in industries like fast food, while government and desk-job wages are more stagnant.

That’s a challenge exemplified by Bell’s employee who took a pay cut to join the clerk’s office.

Also compounding matters for the public sector is the process required to raise pay. While companies can react quickly to increase pay for a job posting if it’s not drawing responses, the public sector can’t.

“[Governments] feel the pressure just like businesses do,” Powell said. “It’s just they feel it on a delay.”

Study yields increases

Following a 2022 compensation study, the city raised the minimum starting wage for city employees to $15 an hour, up from the $13 an hour adopted in 2017.

That minimum wage has seen an annual cost-of-living adjustment of up to 3%, meaning the city’s lowest-paid full-time employees now earn $16.28 per hour, Wishner, the Hogsett spokesperson, wrote in an email.

For 2025, the City-County Council approved a 2.9% cost-of-living adjustment that will raise those wages to $16.75. Forty-two employees make that rate.

Department leaders told IBJ the wage increases implemented after the 2022 analysis have helped with recruiting.

Scott Hohl, executive director of Marion County Community Corrections, said his organization’s salary structure was “particularly problematic” going into the 2022 compensation study. His organization had lower pay than many comparable positions and neighboring agencies in the state. That was made worse by one-off decisions regarding individual wages in previous years that resulted in inequitable pay for employees in identical positions with similar experience.

The process led to higher salaries for starting positions. For example, maintenance technicians went from earning $32,000 to $39,000; corrections officers saw a slight increase from $40,000 to $41,205; supervisor annual pay increased from $52,000 to $61,678.

Now, he said, differences in pay within a particular position are due to experience or years of service.

Joseph O’Connor, the Marion County assessor, said the Assessor’s Office has seen increases in job applications for entry-level open positions.

“There was a time where we would not get any applicants, and we are getting, you know, a dozen in some cases,” O’Connor told IBJ.

The increased starting wage has made a difference, especially for customer service representatives, he said.

But his department still deals with retention problems in part because staffers can find work in the private sector paying more.

When asked whether his employees are fairly compensated, O’Connor said, “I think a lot of them are, and, you know, some of them still are not.”•