The Aberdeen City Council on Wednesday approved only one of eight proposed pay raises for city government positions.

During its meeting, the council approved a 5 percent raise for the finance director position, which has been open since April. The annual starting salary was increased from $90,888 to $95,412.

Mayor Erik Larson said the city is struggling to fill that vacancy as well as the newly created city administrator position because the pay is not competitive.

“With the city administrator, we’ve actually made offers, and those candidates have accepted other offers that were higher from other cities,” said Larson.

To improve the city’s chances of hiring, members of the city’s personnel committee — Larson, council president Tawni Andrews and council member Jeff Cook — proposed boosting the salaries for eight city positions so they would be only 10 percent below the market average for cities comparable to Aberdeen.

“Not approving this, specifically the two vacant positions, is going to have a severe and adverse impact on our ability to hire those two positions,” said Larson. “We have a (finance director) candidate right now that we’d like to interview that has already expressed concerns on whether they would accept the position because of the salary.”

The original proposal included a 10 percent salary increase for the city administrator position (from $100,164 to $110,180); 10 percent for the Public Works director; 15 percent each for the directors of the Parks and Recreation, Community Development and Human Resources departments; and 5 percent each for the positions of city attorney and human resources technician.

In order to focus on the city’s immediate need for a finance director, the council voted to amend the proposal, shaving it down to just that one increase. Council member Dee Anne Shaw, who proposed the amendment, said she felt comfortable waiting until the city’s next budget year to adjust the wages for the other positions.

“It’s not that I don’t want to look at it, but I want to look at it holistically,” said Shaw. “We went out for a finance director and city administrator without dealing with these other positions, and I think I’m pretty comfortable proceeding in that manner and dealing with everything else as part of the budget.”

A few council members also said they didn’t feel they’d had enough time to review the multiple pay increases before Wednesday’s meeting, and that they would be willing to vote on them after doing more research.

There was a major turnout of Aberdeen Public Works employees at the meeting, filling up most of the seating available with employees wearing their orange and yellow work shirts. Hannah Franks, a staff representative for the Washington State Council of County and City Employees, commended the city for proposing to raise the pay for eight positions, and hopes that all city employees will receive the same.

“We hope this is a new philosophy for the city, that you’re going to apply to all of the employees you have here at the city for adjusting wages,” Franks said during the meeting. “Over the past six years, from 2014 to 2019, we have gotten 1 percent (increase) per year in our contract because the city has claimed they have struggles with their budget.”

Council member Kathi Prieto responded multiple times to the crowd of workers, saying although she is in favor of giving the city’s workers union a pay increase, she needs more time before approving the raises for department heads.

Larson later told The Daily World he thought the crowd of union workers might have had an impact on the council’s decision to approve only the finance director’s raise.

With recent efforts by the city to eliminate its largest homeless camp along the Chehalis River, one person in the audience questioned why the city is able to raise the salaries of all its department heads but won’t commit to investing in other methods to help the homeless community.

Mike Nelson, an Aberdeen resident who protested the city’s new ordinance restricting sitting on sidewalks every day over the summer, said paying department heads more is the same as an ongoing cost to address the homeless.

“The city has claimed multiple times it has budget issues and budget constraints when asked to work on issues like addressing shelter, and ongoing costs for the homeless,” Nelson said during the meeting. “That’s one of the rebuttals we keep getting from city officials, particularly Erik, that an ongoing cost of a shelter is going to be greater than simply building a shelter. Likewise, an ongoing increased pay of just selected staff is a substantial investment as well. There’s a mismanagement of funds.”

During the meeting, the council also rejected the appointment of Tawny Olsen as assistant finance director. Olsen has been helping to run the department in the absence of a full-time director. Larson said he’s confident she will be appointed at the next meeting, after further review by council members.