A compensation policy commission has recommended that Monroe County Sheriff Patrick O’Flynn get a pay raise.
O’Flynn is in his fourth, four-year term, and now earns $136,700. His last pay raise was in 2011.
The commission is recommending he receive a nine percent pay raise. This would mean his salary would start at $149,376 beginning Jan. 1, 2017. After that time, if he was re-elected, he would get a pay hike every year until topping out at $174,000.
“I think that the longer you’re in the job, it’s like being in the private sector, if you’re doing your job well, you know what you’re doing, you should get an increase,” Compensation Policy Commission Chairman Robert Hurlbut told Time Warner Cable News. “The fact is with this particular sheriff, that did not happen.”
The commission consists of four Republican appointees and three Democrats.
Democrats on the commission who were at the meeting rejected the proposal. “I wanted it to be truthful in that we had only met for 19 days, two and a half weeks, and not for a full month,” commission member Democrat Mark Muoio told TWC News. “There were some other issues that aren’t fully fleshed out in terms of this pay scale that are just not in the report because I read it over three times and I didn’t know what it was said. I was asking for some clarification and it wasn’t provided. We were bulldozed over by the chairman and my questions were not answered.”
Hurlbut rejected that idea, saying that, “I’m in the nursing home business. I deal with state government, I deal with federal government, and I have to make decisions all the time and I don’t need six months to do this. This was pretty bare bones, pretty easy based on the recommendations after the draft report that we saw at the last meeting.”
The Monroe County Legislature must approve the recommendations before they are put into place. That could come as soon as Tuesday.
