Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders has announced a new state employee pay structure plan that would impact thousands of workers and streamline middle management positions by “consolidating” more than a thousand job titles across executive branch agencies.
During a press conference Tuesday, Sanders unveiled a plan to increase salaries for specific state jobs, including social workers, law enforcement and nurses at the Arkansas Department of Health. Sanders also said that she has not been tapped to join the administration of President-elect Donald Trump. Trump announced earlier Tuesday that he’s nominated Sanders’ father, former Gov. Mike Huckabee, as the United States Ambassador to Israel.
“I have already announced my bid for reelection, and I look forward to serving in this position for another six years,” Sanders said when asked about a position within the Trump administration. “So unfortunately, and hopefully, you guys are stuck with me for a while. The only member of my family going to the administration is my dad.”
(Arkansas governors are limited to two four-year terms. Sanders was first elected in 2022 and will be up for re-election in 2026.)
The pay increases would cost about $100 million, and Sanders said she will ask the heads of state agencies to find funding from their existing budgets, should the plan pass in the upcoming legislative session. If passed, it would go into effect at the beginning of the next fiscal year on July 1, 2025.
If state agencies, such as the Department of Human Services or the Department of Health, could not find additional funding, Sanders said, “We would look for other funding sources.” She mentioned a state “performance” fund which “has an extremely healthy balance of around $72 million.”
The new employee pay plan and government restructuring proposal comes after the state hired Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm McKinsey & Co. for $5.5 million earlier this year to assist with making the state’s 15 executive branch agencies more efficient. Part of McKinsey’s recommendations include raising salaries to “labor market rates” as well as consolidating middle management positions and creating clear career paths for employees, Sanders said.
“I have made no secret that I believe Arkansas’s current state employment pay plan is broken,” Sanders said. “It is confusing. It does not reward hard work, and it is not recruiting new hires for our most in-demand positions. Frankly, it is failing men and women who work in state government, and because of that, it is failing the people of Arkansas.”
Sanders said Arkansas’s pay plan was taken “down to the studs.”
The proposal, which would have to be passed by the state Legislature next year, would increase the salaries of about 15,000 workers to “comparable labor market rates” in Arkansas. The pay raises are targeted towards roles where there are ongoing issues with retention and recruitment, including correctional officers, state troopers, nursing and social services.
For correctional officers, entry level salaries would increase from $37,000 to about $50,000, a 35% bump. The average salary of an Arkansas state trooper would climb by 10%, from $73,318 to $80,930. The plan calls for raising both starting salaries and average salaries for nurses: An average nurse’s salary would increase to $61,552 from $57,686, a 9.6% increase, while starting salaries would increase 8.3% to $54,661.
“McKinsey recommended bringing [salaries] up to the labor market rate,” Leslie Fisken, secretary of the Department of Transformation and Shared Services, said during Tuesday’s press conference.
Fisken, whose agency is leading the charge to streamline state government, said about a third of the 22,000 employees who work for the state are earning salaries in line with commensurate positions in the private and public sectors. About 15,000 employees would receive salary increases under the new pay plan.
But the plan also calls for reducing 2,200 job titles to 800, Fisken said, a move that “allows us as a state to align with other public markets but the private sector as well.” It is not clear whether those reductions would include layoffs.
State agencies would also be required to create more well-defined career paths and employees would be encouraged “to seek training for additional skills and certification by establishing skills-based — rather than degree-based — career tracks.”
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