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March 3, 2020

Jackson County Workers Vote to Go On STRIKE!

Should Jackson County’s employees get paid more without decreasing the Administrator’s and Commissioners’ compensation? This question was explored by filing a Public Records Request in early February 2020 to examine the compensation of Jackson County elected officials.

Five Oregon counties are used by the County Budget Committee (half of which is comprised of the three commissioners) to arrive at a “mean” (or average) to determine how much compensation is deemed to be ‘fair’ when compared to those five, hand-selected counties: Clackamas, Deschutes, Lane, Linn, and Marion.

Each county’s ‘seat’ was then researched to determine a cost-of-living (COL) comparison with Medford, the seat of Jackson County. Normalization was then performed to get Medford’s COL index down to a value of 1.00 by dividing itself and the other five counties’ COL indices by Medford’s 100.6, so that the other five county seats’ COL index would be commensurately reduced, just to be fair.

Salaries of each of the five ‘other’ counties were then reduced based on their normalized COL factors to produce the five values needed to arrive at the ‘mean’ so Jackson County salaries could be equitably determined.

The Green line in each chart below represents the ‘raw’ 5-county