INTEREST ARBITRATIONS

Decision Information

King County v. Technical Employee Association (17685-I-03)

Collection	INTEREST ARBITRATIONS
Date	02/14/2005
Case Number	17685-I-03
Decision Maker	Arbitrator
Case Type	Interest Arbitration
Additional Information	Howell Lankford
Statute	PECB - RCW 41.56

Decision Content

In the Matter of the Interest Arbitration

between Technical Employees Association (“Association” )
or “TEA”) )
) Findings,
and ) Discussion and
) Award
King County, Washington (“County”). )
_______________________________________________________)

Case Numbers: PERC case No. 17685-I-0490 and 17686-I-03-0410
Arbitrator's case No. EA1

Representing TEA: James M. Cline, Cline and Associates, 999 Third
Avenue, Suite 3800, Seattle, WA 98104

Representing the Otto G. Klein and Summit Law Group, P.C., 315
County: Fifth Avenue S., Suite 1000, Seattle, WA 98104.

Neutral Arbitrator: Howell L. Lankford, Esq., P.O. Box 22331,
Milwaukie, OR 97269-0331.

Party-appointed David Levin, King County Personnel, 500 Fourth
Arbitrators: Avenue, Room 450, MS 4A, Seattle, WA 98104,
appointed by the County.

Chris Casillas, Esq., Cline & Associates, 999 Third
Avenue, Suite 3800, Seattle, WA 98 101, appointed
by TEA.

Hearing held: In the offices of the Summit Law Group in Seattle,
Washington, on March 2-5 and April 27 & 28, 2004.

Witnesses for TEA: Elizabeth Morgan, David Crippen, Stephanie
Woodward, Marc Dallas, Dave Wallace, and Severne
Johnson.

Witnesses for the Harold Taniguchi, Sid Bender, Jill Krecklow, Rick
county: Hayes, Olivia Sroufe, Chris Egan, and Matthew
McCoy.

Post-hearing argument From both parties on August 16, both timely
received: postmarked on August 11,2004.

Date of this January 31, 2005
award:

CONTENTS

HISTORY AND CONTEXT 3 COSTS, ABILITY TO PAY
The employer 7 and FISCAL CONSTRAINTS 33
The Union 8
The work 9 INSURANCE 36

COMPENSATION THE FINAL NUMBERS 37
PROPOSALS 11 Broadband v. Steps 37
Which classifications
COMPARABILITY 12 to sample? 38
TEA ’s labor market analysis: Simple averages or
Public Employers 12 weighted averages? 41
TEA ’s private Sector City of Seattle and Seattle
Comparators 15 City Light 42
The County’s proposed Port of Seattle workweek 42
Comparables 16 The "snapshot" date 42
Choice of comparables 20 The "real top:" Merit pay 43
Internal Comparability 21
King County and COMPARISON TABLES 45
the “market” 23
Formal consistency OTHER ISSUES 47
Substantive
consistency 24 AWARD 48
Private sector comparables 27
Public sector comparables 28

COST OF LIVING 31

RECRUITMENT AND
RETENTION 32

This is an interest arbitration proceeding arising out of the negotiations of
an initial collective bargaining agreement for the employees in the County’s public
transportation design and construction department. There are no preliminary
issues of substantive or procedural arbitrability.¹ The hearing was extensive and
orderly. Both parties had the opportunity to present evidence, to call and to cross-
examine witnesses, and to argue the case; and both filed timely and extensive post-
hearing briefs. The parties voluntarily agreed to waive the statutory timelines for
issuance of this Award in light of the complexity of the issues and the size of the
record (which runs to 17 volumes, or about eight linear feet).

HISTORY AND CONTEXT

At bottom, this is a garden-variety interest arbitration. It addresses the
economic core issues for the initial collective bargaining agreement for about 75
employees in the transportation engineering design and construction division of
King County.² On the other hand, this particular dispute includes just about every
complication imaginable-and some that would have been hard to imagine-in an
interest arbitration case. Those complications form the history and context of the
dispute; and four of them are crucial:

First, this will be an initial contract, so there is no squarely relevant “track
record” to look to.

Second, the employees in this bargaining unit come from Metro. Metro
was an entirely separate unit of government until it was merged with the County,
as a result of court decisions, in about 1996. (The other two divisions of
Metro-waste water management and technical services-were also absorbed into
the County administration.³) Metro had its own classification scheme, which was
substantially different from that of the County. In particular, Metro almost limited
the job title “Engineer” to employees who were licensed as Professional Engineers
under RCW 18.43.020 et sec.⁴ About 30-35 of the about 75 employees in this
bargaining unit are Engineers in Metro’s sense. On the other hand, the County
uses the job title “Engineer” in a much more generic sense; and the County
workforce includes about 350-400 employees who fall under that title in the
County’s sense. In the County’s Roads Division, some of the employees whom the
County classifies as Engineer do not even have BS degrees in engineering, and
some of the Senior Engineers and even Managing Engineers (the top two
classifications in the series) do not have PE licenses. Job titles are, of course, an
entirely non-mandatory topic of collective bargaining; and the title issue itself is
not presented in this case. But that difference in the application of the “Engineer”
job title-and the underlying dispute about what constitutes an engineer-severely
colors the parties’ approach to comparability and complicates the entire case. The
integration of the two workforces, as Director of the Department of Transportation
put it, was “wonderfully difficult and wonderfully awkward” due, in part, to the
two quite different cultures involved.

To make this unification element even more complicated, the County is
completing the implementation of a new class comp plan. (In fact, for most of the
County’s professional and technical classifications, the new classification system
and pay ranges were implemented in January, 2002, retroactive to January, 1998.⁵)
Thus the record includes reference to old County class titles and descriptions, new
County class titles and descriptions, and Metro class titles and descriptions.⁶ (The
County included an appeal procedure as part of the transition from the old classes
into the new; but that procedure was generally completed by the time TEA was
recognized in 2001.) Because the transition from the Metro classification plan to
the County’s new class comp plan is just now being completed, the County is
particularly keen on seeing this bargaining unit end up with overall compensation
that can be rationally related to the rest of the County’s workforce. On the other
hand, there seems to be no dispute that the initial release of the County’s class
comp scheme was the major driving force behind the initial formation of the
Technical Employees Association, because the employees in this unit-and
perhaps some of the managers brought over from Metro-were deeply offended by
the County’s new scheme.⁷

Third, the Washington legislature added “public passenger transportation
system” employees to the list of public employees subject to interest arbitration
under RCW Chapter 41.56 . Most of that Chapter previously addressed “uniformed
personnel,” i.e. police officers, corrections officers, and firefighters; and the
legislature extended to public transit employees most of the interest arbitration
procedures previously set out for those uniformed personnel. But when it came to
the list of factors to be considered in interest arbitration, the legislature specifically
departed from the factors set out for uniformed personnel interest disputes. The
first two listed factors are the same, i.e. authority of the employer and stipulations
of the parties; and here are the differences:

Uniformed (41.56.465(1))
Transit (41.56.492(2))

c. ...[C]omparison of the wages, hours
and conditions of employment of
personnel involved in the proceedings
with the wages, hours and conditions
of employment of like personnel of
like employers of similar size on the
west coast of the United States. * * *⁸

c. Compensation package
comparisons, economic indices, fiscal
constraints, and similar factors
determined by the arbitration panel to
be pertinent to the case; and

d. The average consumer prices for
goods and services, commonly known
as the cost of living.

e. Changes in any of the circumstances under (a) through (d) of this
subsection during the pendency of the
proceedings; and

f. Such other factors ... that are
normally or traditionally taken into
consideration in the determination of
wages, hours, and conditions of
Employment. * * *
d. Such other factors ... which are
normally or traditionally taken into
consideration in the determination of
wages, hours, and conditions of
employment.

The statutory language applicable to uniformed service personnel focuses
the interest arbitration panel’s attention on “like employers of similar size;” and
the statutory language applicable to transit personnel does not. The Association
does not dispute that similarity in size is a proper consideration in the selection of
comparables, but it points out that “like employers” would, of course, be public
sector employers (41.56.030( 1)). There are no private sector employees of
uniformed service personnel, but there certainly are private sector transit
employers; and the Association argues that the language of the statute controlling
this case makes room for-and, indeed, requires-comparison with private sector
employees performing quite similar work. The County disagrees.

Fourth, with respect to most uniformed services personnel, duties and
responsibilities are generally fairly similar from employer to employer by
classification. Most interest arbitration cases, therefore, can establish one or two
“index points” to examine in order to have a pretty good picture of the
comparability of the entire workforce; and the parties’ disputes in this area are
typically over whether, e.g., a 15-year firefighter or a 10-year firefighter is the
proper indicator employee for comparison of the unit’s compensation generally. In
short, a firefighter is a firefighter is a firefighter and a corrections officer is a
corrections officer is a corrections officer. On the other hand, alas, a senior
managing engineer is not necessarily a senior managing engineer. The process of
comparing overall compensation is vastly complicated in the case at hand because
there are so very few nonproblematic correspondences of classifications among the
various candidate comparable employers.

The employer. King County is massive, and the former Metro employees
account for about a third of its workforce. As of February, 2003, that workforce
included almost 14,700 employees. 11,700 of them are represented in a total of
almost 100 different bargaining units.⁹ The County’s operations are organized into
eight major departments.¹⁰ A summary list of those departments provides some
faint picture of the scope of the County’s business: Executive Services,
Community & Human Services, Public Health, Natural Resources and Parks,
Development and Environmental Services, Adult & Juvenile Detention, and
Transportation. The Transit Division is one of five in the Department of
Transportation (along with Road Services, Fleet Administration, Airport, and the
DOT Director’s Office). The largest concentrations of the County’s engineer
employees-as the County uses that term-are divided as follows: about 33 in
Transit, about 335 in Roads, and not quite 60 in Wastewater. The engineers in the
Transit Division make up not quite half of the bargaining unit at issue in the case
at hand.

The largest concentration of engineers-in the County’s sense of the
term-is in the Road Services Division (which was called Public Works before the
unification of the County and Metro workforces). That Division is charged with
the design and construction of new roads and bridges and the widening and
redesign and maintenance of existing roads and intersections in the unincorporated
portions of the County.¹¹ As in the TEA unit, the Roads Division contracts out a
substantial amount of work, depending on the size of a particular project and the
current workload of the Division.

The Union. There were two sides of Metro, transit and wastewater; and
Metro’s entire design and construction section supported both sides. The
employees of that section were unrepresented. Metro’s structure was left more or
less intact from about 1994 to 1995, which was the initial year of the
consolidation. But eventually the design and construction engineers had to choose
whether to become part of the County’s Transit Division or part of its Waste Water
Division. The County had begun working on a revised classification/compensation
(hereafter, “class comp”) system-in anticipation of the consolidation-since
about 1993; and the new class comp classes were unveiled between 1994 and
1996.¹² For a time, therefore, the County operated with a pastiche of old County
classifications, old Metro classifications, and new class comp classifications.

The former Metro design and construction employees were not very happy
with the new class comp classifications, compensation or approach to the
engineering profession. In 1995 they petitioned PERC for the creation of a
combined bargaining unit (wastewater, water resources, and transit), but the County
objected; and, in 1997, PERC agreed that such a unit was not appropriate because
it reflected the organization of the now-defunct Metro, rather than the organization
of the current employer, King County.¹³ Negotiations and litigation continued; and
early in 2001 the County finally recognized four separate bargaining units, each
represented by the Technical Employees Association: the Transit Division
employees (wall-to-wall), the Transit Division supervisors, the Waste Water
employees, and the Waste Water supervisors.¹⁴ The first two of those units are
parties to this interest arbitration.¹⁵

The County had long been bargaining with its other various unions about the
consequences of adoption of the new class comp system. Those discussions had
generally been completed by the time the County recognized TEA as the
representative of the Transit Division employees. The County’s original proposal
in negotiations with TEA was for all the Transit Division employees to
immediately shift into the new class comp classifications, too.¹⁶ But the County
eventually agreed to make no classification changes for employees in four of the
classification series in this bargaining unit: Engineers, Construction Management,
Project Control, and Designer. There is no dispute at all that the County’s proposed
imposition of the new class comp classification scheme on those employees was
one of (and perhaps the major) impetus behind the initial formation of the TEA.
(The County intends to shift bargaining unit employees in other series to the most
appropriate new class comp classifications at the end of the negotiation process.¹⁷)

The work: The County inherited from Metro the largest commuter van /
ride-share program in the United States, operating somewhere between 6,000 and
7,000 vans. The TEA bargaining unit is responsible for designing the park & ride
lots; and the trend is toward larger, multi-story facilities.

The bargaining unit designs 200-300 bus shelters or bus stops per year. The
process involved in such a project illustrates the nature of the bargaining unit’s
everyday work. The process begins with customer requests or with bus data
showing volumes of passenger loading at a particular location. An employee then
checks to see if a shelter is plausible, and there is a location and design review to
determine proper size and chair-lift accessability. Plans are drawn and building
permits are secured from the proper jurisdiction. The Construction Section then
does a RFP and gets a contractor to do the actual building under TEA employees'
oversight. The entire process takes six to twelve months and involves several
bargaining unit employees: a Civil Engineer and technician doing the design and
CAD work, an Electrical Engineer, a Planner, and unit employees taking care of
right-of-way and construction.

For those four classification series, the parties in these negotiations tried to
work out some comparisons with some of the arguably relevant nearby public employers.
That required an analysis of the classifications at issue. The parties created a committee
including representatives of King County Human Resources, of the old Metro
organization managers, and of TEA representatives. After extensive discussion, the
committee decided that the only practical focus for comparison was in terms of minimum
qualifications for the various classifications. The following chart sets out the
Committee's agreed conclusions about the minimum education and experience
requirements for the classifications in the largest three of these four series which will
remain in the old Metro classes in the TEA bargaining unit. The first number in
parenthesis shows the number of employees in that class. (From .) There is no
similar agreement about the minimum education and experience qualifications for the
other series in the bargaining unit (except for the PCE series), which the County does not
agree to leave in the old Metro classes.

ENGINEER SERIES

Engineer I (0) BS in engineering
Engineer II (1) BS in engineering plus two years engineering experience
Engineer III (6) BS in engineering, EIT Certificate, and three years engineering
experience¹⁸
Engineer IV (9) (unit super- BS in engineering, PE License and five years engineering
visors, e.g. civil, mechanical) experience¹⁹
Engineer V (10) (Department BS in engineering, PE License, ten years engineering experience,
supervisor²⁰) and five years experience as a supervisor
Engineer VI (5)

DESIGNER SERIES

Designer II²¹ (1) AA degree in science
Designer III (1) AA and three years experience as engineering designer
Designer IV (6) AA and five years experience
Designer V (2) (lead designer AA and five years experience
for a unit, e.g. civil, etc.)
Designer VI (1) BS in engineering and eight years experience (equivalent to
Engineer III).²²

CONSTRUCTION MANAGEMENT SERIES

Const. Mgr. I (0) One year of college or one year experience as an inspector
Const. Mgr. II (1) Three years experience in constr. mgt., or AA in science and one
year experience in const. mgt.
Const. Mgr. III (9) Six years experience, or AA and four years experience, or BS in
engineering.
Const. Mgr. IV (3) BS in engineering and six years experience in constr. mgt.
Const. Mgr. V BS and seven years experience in constr. mgt.
Const. Mgr. VI MS in engineering and ten years experience in const. mgt.

COMPENSATION PROPOSALS

TEA’S compensation proposal is relatively simple but very substantial. It consists
of across -the-board increases in each year of a three-year contract: a huge, 19.32%
increase effective February 4,2002, and, on January 1 of 2003 and 2004, 100% of the
Seattle CPI-W for the prior June, with a minimum each year of 2%. TEA also proposes
the continuation of the County’s established 5% merit pay program and the addition of a
5% additional payment for employees in positions requiring a PE or Architect stamp.

The County’s proposal, on the other hand, is quite complex and includes moving
many bargaining unit employees onto a different compensation scale, i.e. that used in the
County’s workforce in general. That basis of that movement is the initial shift to
whatever cell of an employee’s salary range is at least as high as his or her current salary
(with those over the top of the schedule being, essentially, red-circled until the schedule
catches up with their rates). (The entire proposal, including the proposed transition rules,
is set out below as Appendix A.) The County then proposes COLA increases for 2003
and 2004 of 90% of the All Cities CPI-W index for the prior September, with 2%
minimum and a 6% maximum.

COMPARABILITY

TEA’s proposal addresses several alternative sets of comparables, arguing that
there are three sorts of informative comparisons to consider: similar public sector
employers, similar private sector employers, and local labor market comparators.

As the appropriate local comparables-if any-TEA proposes the City of Seattle,
Seattle City Light, Sound Transit, and the Port of Seattle; but TEA argues that even this
set of local public sector employers does not include truly comparable jobs for much of
this bargaining unit. (The next closest “local” comparable, according to TEA would be
TriMet, in the Portland metropolitan area.)

TEA ’s labor market analysis: Public employers. TEA proposes a “macro labor
market” consisting of the western coastal United States. Looking for large metropolitan
transit operations within that general area, TEA comes up with the Alameda-Contra Costa
Transit District in the San Francisco-Oakland area, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit
Authority, the Orange County Transportation Authority, Sacramento Regional Transit
District, San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART), San Mateo County
Transit District, Santa Clara Valley Transit Authority (around San Jose), the San
Francisco Municipal Railway, and Tri-Met (around Portland). In order to establish
similarity, TEA analyzes these public transit employers in terms of a variety of factors
such as annual scheduled vehicle revenue miles, annual vehicle revenue hours, unlinked
passenger trips, and passenger miles. Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit comes out
substantially ahead in most of those respects. (It’s 495,000 unlinked passenger trips per
year is almost five times King County Transit’s 98,000, for example.) But King County
Transit is in second place for half of those comparisons and quite near the top in the
others.

The table on the next two pages sets out the fundamentals of TEA’s comparability
data, classification by classification, with respect to these public sector comparables.

(Table Split in Two-Due to limited space)
(Unable to read)

CLASS
City of Seattle
Port of Seattle
Seattle City Lighting
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?

Engineer I
28.89
32.33
31.74
30.89
25.79

Engineer II
32.19
34.22
35.70
45.11
35.16
33.61
30.49
29.54

Engineer III
41.67
40.85
39.71
38.91
49.74
41.71
35.49
32.57
40.04
35.65

Engineer IV
36.30
46.98
39.20
48.35
39.71
42.38
57.58
48.29
39.08
46.24
37.71
43.86
42.55

Engineer V
38.12
49.85
41.31
57.58
43.85
63.48
55.89
45.72
56.35
45.84
52.86

Engineer VI
41.49
55.98
48.43
54.49
69.99
61.79
54.69
56.35
53.06
63.64
57.87

Project Control Engineer I
28.89
32.33
31.74
30.89
25.79

PCE II
32.19
34.22
34.83
45.11
35.16
33.61
30.49
29.54

PCE III
41.67
40.85
39.71
37.96
49.74
41.71
35.49
32.57
40.04
35.65

PCE IV
36.30
46.98
39.2
48.35
39.71
41.35
57.58
48.39
39.08
46.24
37.71
43.86
42.55

Designer II
23.13

Designer III
30.39
28.06
27.01
23.44
25.52

Designer IV
34.25
28.41
32.57
29.35
30.49

Designer V
33.99

Construction Manager I
26.55

CM II
27.22
29.5

CM III
31.02
32.57
35.70
37.29

CM IV
36.30
41.67
38.91
40.04

CM V
38.12
46.98
41.35
43.86

CM VI
41.97
55.98
49.39
44.99
48.28

Real Property Agent I
35.79

RPA II
28.06
30.49

RPA III
31.80
41.67
34.99
35.70
30.48
34.72

RPA IV
35.85
44.26
40.82
46.12
52.08
44.68

RPA V
33.30
49.85
40.82
46.12
52.08
44.68

Environmental Planner I
28.06
30.49

EP II
31.18
36.83
32.57
42.96
32.84

EP III
34.56
44.26
41.42
37.79
39.01
35.49
41.32

Admin. Spec. I
15.98
17.13
17.78
19.44
18.72
21.81
20.83

Admin. Spec. II
20.67
19.37
19.19
21.00
21.73
22.31
24.55
22.84
23.87
23.66
20.01

TEA ’s Private Sector Comparators. TEA also proposes to compare bargaining unit
salaries with the salaries paid by local private sector firms employing similar employees to
do similar work.²³ There is no dispute that the County does not do all of its transit design
and construction work “in-house.” On the contrary, 60%-80% of the design and
construction work is contracted out. With respect to that work, the function of the
bargaining unit employees is to get enough of the design specifications put together to draft
an accurate RFP (Request for Proposal), to evaluate the resulting bids, and then to maintain
some oversight over the contractor’s progress and approve the contractor’s final
product.²⁴ The County also commissions work on a work order basis (without going
through the RFP process) from some local firms with special expertise. Those outside
experts thus essentially function as supplemental County staff. The County does some of
this work in-house.²⁵ Therefore, there are employees of the private contractors who do the
identical sort of work as bargaining unit employees. TEA’S list of private sector
comparators includes four firms with such work order contracts with the County: HDR
Engineering, Berger/ABAM, Tetra Tech/KCM, and URS. (TEA recognizes that these
firms generally have equivalents only for the higher level bargaining unit employees.²⁶)

The umbrella work-order contracts between the County and each of those firms sets
out billing rates for the higher level employees of the contractors. Based on those rates,
TEA calculates the following comparisons between the County’s wages and those paid by
the contractors.²⁷ The “#” column indicates the number of private sector matching
employees TEA found in each classification. The comparison does not reflect difference in
benefits, and there appears to be no room for doubt that the compensation and benefit
systems differ substantially between County employees and contractor employees.

Classification
#
'02 %
'03 %
'04 %

Proj. Control III
2
115.6
119.1
108.6

Designer IV
2
100.5
103.7
107.7

Const. Mgr. III
4
108.9
111.9
115.4

Const. Mgr. IV
4
115.2
119.2
123.6

Designer V
2
119.7
123.8

Engineer III
9
95.0
95.7
101.0

Engineer IV
18
105.0
114.2
116.3

Engineer V
9
121.8
128.7
134.4

Engineer VI
8
138.0
148.3
151.3

TEA offers two additional reasons for comparison with local private sector
employers: because they compete for the same pool of trained workers and because Metro
commonly included such comparisons in its own compensation studies. Metro’s 1991
salary survey covered a selection of “Transit Organizations,’’ “Water Pollution Control
Organizations,” (relevant only to the other side of Metro’s operation) “Regional/Local
Public Organizations,’’ Private Sector Organizations,” and “Participants in Published
Surveys.’’ The private sector organizations were CH2MHill (Bellevue), HNTB (Bellevue),
Simpson Investment Co. (Seattle), Envirotech Operating Services (Birmingham, AL),
Morrison/Knudsen (Boise, ID), Washington Forest Protection Assn. (Olympia), and HRD
Engineering, Inc. (Bellevue).

The County's proposed comparables. The County’s primary goal-or, at least, one
of them-in this proceeding is internal consistency. “An engineer is an engineer is an
engineer,” as the County puts it. The County’s proposal for this bargaining unit, therefore,
is exactly the same as its proposal for “similar employees”-a claim which TEA
contests-in the Roads unit. As one would imagine, the County’s selection of comparables
was determined by its established, formally adopted policy for the selection of comparables
in general. In 1997-in the midst of the Metro unification and class comp processes-the
County passed Motion 10262, which sets out the County’s basic approach to employee
compensation:

A. That placement of classifications on salary ranges should be primarily based on
the market.

B. When developing and using market information to guide the placement of
classifications on salary ranges:

1. The market should be defined as large public sector employers in the
Puget Sound region, except where insufficient numbers of comparable
jobs exist within the local public sector market or where recruitment and
any employer-identified concerns regarding retention exist, then other
public or private sector employers may be considered as appropriate; and
2. King County will define “large public sector employers in the Puget
Sound” region to include, but not be limited to, Pierce and Snohomish
counties, the cities of Seattle, Tacoma, Everett, Bellevue; the Port of
Seattle; University of Washington; and the State of Washington. King
County reserves the right to modify or add to this list where insufficient
numbers of similar jobs are found in the foregoing public agencies; and
3. Classifications should be assigned to salary ranges so that compensation
falls no more than five percent above or below the market average. . .

b. For nonrepresented groups, market analysis will be conducted at least every three
years or more frequently if necessary. Criteria for expanding market analysis
beyond the local public sector include:
(1) There are an insufficient number of qualified local candidates;
(2) There are an insufficient number of comparable employers.

By its own terms, that ordinance does not apply to bargaining units that are eligible for
interest arbitration; but the County proposes a selection of comparables in this case which
are, according to the County, consistent with the philosophy set out in Ordinance 10262.
The County proposes to compare here with seven of the listed public sector employers:
Snohomish and Pierce Counties, the Cities of Seattle, Tacoma, Bellevue, and Everett, and
the Port of Seattle. The County also proposes to add the Sound Transit and the Cities of
Federal Way, Kent, and Renton (the next three largest cities in the Puget Sound region and
a large, nearby transit district), which are not included in the Ordinance.²⁸ The table on the
following pages sets out the County’s comparability data.²⁹ (The County notes that many of
the figures for other employers’ wage rates are compositions averaging two jobs.)

Table 3: County’s Comparables

Bellevue
Everett
Federal Way
Kent
Pierce County
Port of Seattle
Renton
Seattle
Snohomish City
Sound Transit
Tacoma
Average
King County
% Difference

Engineer I
61,568
60,258
53,893
58,906
58,053
62,941
59,270
58,219
1.8%

Engineer II
69,680
60,715
65,614
60,736
68,349
55,499
59,467
64,355
65,478
66,654
63,655
65,541
-2.9%

Engineer III
80,850
69,306
69,659
69,873
72,873
65,686
65,686
68,463
68,765
69,440
70,480
70,100
70,366
-0.4%

Engineer IV
80,850
76,232
72,271
78,972
77,397
75,252
77,210
72,571
71,120
74,194
75,607
73,798
2.5%

Engineer V
82,181
85,509
78,790
85,145
84,142
87,772
87,339
76,211
80,432
84,885
83,241
83,075
0.2%

Engineer VI
92,331
89,843
88,369
89,170
82,950
96,984
92,000
90,235
89,211
1.1%

Constr. Mgr. I
47,174
47,664
55,598
42,243
49,338
48,403
49,317
-1.9%

Constr. Mgr. II
53,604
52,584
60,757
51,334
59,238
55,503
58,219
-4.7%

Constr. Mgr. III
60,048
58,642
57,876
57,684
60,258
61,947
68,474
53,852
59,848
65,541
-8.7%

Constr. Mgr. IV
66,300
69,306
67,116
68,349
68,904
71,677
68,765
65,333
68,219
72,072
-5.3%

Designer I
42,243
42,349
42,296
44,845
-5.7%

Designer II
45,947
49,057
46,467
55,598
48,835
49,181
49,317
-0.3%

Designer III
57,158
50,648
49,728
49,899
53,893
60,757
51,334
53,345
55,515
-3.9%

Designer IV
54,888
60,258
44,304
59,467
53,851
53,102
54,312
58,219
-6.7%

Designer V
66,300
68,474
59,383
58,428
63,146
65,541
-3.7%

Designer VI
68,349
71,677
62,357
67,461
70,366
-4.1%

Transp. Planner
76,932
60,444
61,572
68,616
68,349
70,030
58,472
67,891
62,357
72,862
66,753
72,061
-7.4%

Transp. Planner IV
85,197
78,678
68,796
72,024
72,758
84,670
66,581
68,760
68,099
73,951
93,798
0.2%

Administration I
54,372
46,176
51,896
44,220
57,179
56,592
50,731
51,595
52,936
-2.5%

Admin. Spec. II
44,747
40,956
42,120
44,304
43,805
38,148
35,547
37,411
41,746
40,976
38,896
5.3%

Admin. Staff Asst.
51,734
41,974
50,045
42,243
46,499
50,482
-7.9%

Info. Syst. Prof.
69,672
63,503
66,000
70,344
72,800
70,318
60,984
60,632
56,599
66,560
65,741
67,122
-2.1%

Prop. Agent III
70,012
64,812
64,298
64,251
73,847
62,496
63,586
59,376
66,477
65,462
65,540
-0.1%

Bus. Finance Off. III
66,300
67,308
69,312
57,684
72,758
69,000
62,941
66,472
70,366
-5.5%

Choice of comparables. This preliminary issue is, of course, at the very heart of the
case. Both parties recognize that the Washington courts have held quite clearly that interest
arbitration is not a substitute for collective bargaining but only “an extension” of the
collective bargaining process. City of Bellevue v. Int ’l Ass’n of Firefighters, Local 1604,
119 Wn.2d 373 (1992). But, although they hold hands at the beginning of the analytical
journey, the parties almost immediately find different paths leading from the Court’s
holding in City of Bellevue. The County, essentially, stresses that an interest arbitrator
should not impose on an employer a contract which it would never, never accept in two-
party negotiations; and the Association stresses that an interest-arbitrable bargaining unit is
not just another bargaining unit, because the theoretical consequences of a work stoppage
in interest-arbitrable units has been recognized by the legislature to be unacceptable.³⁰

I submit that interest arbitration is properly viewed as “an extension of the collective
bargaining process” not in the sense of collective bargaining as economic warfare-based
on “the mutual ability to do one another harm”-but in the sense of a good faith exchange
of reasons and arguments. It is undoubtably true that the economic warfare model played
an important role in the history of collective bargaining. But the fundamental right of
unions-in the private sector and certainly in the public sector in Washington-is not
simply the right to strike but the right to bargain, the right to engage in the good faith
exchange of reasons and argument. Both in the private sector and in the public sector in
Washington the right to bargain was soon recognized as including the right to have access
to the information relied on by the other side; and so the fundamental right to bargain
became the right to look at the data and to analyze and argue about it. In two-party
negotiations, that exchange is convincing or not depending only on whether the parties
come to agree. Interest arbitration is an extension of the collective bargaining process in
the sense that it provides a neutral third party to be convinced-or not-by the same sort of
data, analyses and arguments the parties traditionally exchange in two-party negotiations.

Internal Comparability. The County makes two, very different appeals to internal
consistency. The first is largely a matter of the form of the compensation structure. The
County is just in the process of completing a lengthy and expensive process of revising its
classification and compensation system; and the County is particularly anxious to avoid the
continuation of a significant exception to that system. The second appeal to internal
consistency is more a matter of substance and comparability. The County argues,
essentially, that the most significant comparable of all should be the County itself. The
County points out that this is not a typical uniformed services interest arbitration in which,
for example, all of the employer’s police officers are in the bargaining unit at issue and the
only possible comparison is with police officers who work for other employers. In this
instance, according to the County, all of the classifications at issue in the TEA bargaining
unit are also found throughout the rest of the County’s workforce. If the usual dispute in
picking comparables is over the degree of similarity between the subject employer and each
proposed comparable, then the County should certainly be its own first comparator because
nothing is more similar than identity.

Internal Comparability: King County and the “market.” The County’s proposal to
compare bargaining unit compensation with compensation of the rest of the County
workforce runs into one immediate problem: The County’s own study has identified certain
structural shortcomings in the County’s compensation system. The County performs its
own market study every three years in an “attempt to place the wages of King County
employees at the midpoint of the local market.” The “local market” for the study consists of
some of those nearby public employers identified by the County’s own ordinance. (See p.
17, above.) The 2002 study, “King County Wage Rates Versus The Market” (hereafter,
“2002 Study”), is included in the record before us and reached some particularly
compelling conclusions about the County and about some of the comparables in the case at
hand.³¹ Three of those conclusions require consideration here.

First, with respect to the County’s Compensation structure in general-and, once again,
taking the ordinance’s definition of “market”-the Study concluded

The market rate is reached by the King County Salary schedule at the 10‘ and top step. It
takes an employee 8- 12 years (or more) to reach the market rate after being hired by King
County, therefore: King County receives the benefit of body of work performed for 7- 1/2
years below the market rate. (Page 2, italics in the original.)

By comparison, the Study found that “most City of Seattle employees reach the top of their pay
scales, i.e. attain the market rate, in 3 -1/2 years from the commencement of employment;” and
[r]epresented employees in Bellevue . . . reach market rates after 4 - ‘/z years of service”
(2002 Study at pp 2-4). Most City of Seattle employees are on a five-step pay schedule;
and most Bellevue employees are on a six-step schedule; as compared to the ten-step
structure of the County’s pay schedule. This conclusion of the 2002 Study is a substantial
part of the reason for my general agreement with TEA’S argument that comparison should
proceed in terms of top step rates.³² Even beyond that consequence, however, the 2002
Study’s recognition of the deformation of the County’s compensation system with respect
to the market in general has significance for this overall dispute.

Second, the Study also addressed cost of living increases, with this introduction:

While the “10 step” pay plan utilized by King County is responsible for some of the market
lag experienced by King County employees, the majority of the market lag is due to the salary
market moving faster than the County’s current pay plan. The County’s cost of living
adjustment since 1990 has been lower than other public agencies, which creates a
contradiction between the County’s policy to pay salary at market and adjust cost of living
increases using the 90% all-Cities CPI index. Organizations in the Seattle area that increase
wages based on the Seattle CPI-W index provide raises that surpass the County by almost 1%
per year^FN.

[FN: To keep up with the market, the County lag behind those employers tied to the Seattle
CPI-W index is approximately 2.5% every 3 years.] (2002 Study at p. 5.)

That recognition is significant both for the County’s proposal-addressed immediately
below-to bring this bargaining unit onto the County’s common “squared table” for
compensation rates and for the parties’ dispute about the proper CPI index for cost-of-
living increases.

Finally, the 2002 Study addresses the turnover consequences of the County’s
departure from market compensation:

Failure to pay wages near or at the market rate contributes to high turnover rate in County
employment. In the year 2000, the average turnover rate for King County was 9.8%. The
turnover rate for those not represented by labor unions was 14.4%, well above the overall
county average. * * *

Statutory provisions enjoyed by interest arbitration groups, over which the County has no
control, can cause turnover rate to be lower than non-interest arbitration eligible employees
. . . It should be noted that interest arbitration bargaining units which by statute must be
paid at market wage have a lower turnover than other county workers. Once interest
arbitration units are excluded, the turnover rate for county workers jumps to 10.6%. (2002
Study at 7-8, footnotes and charts omitted.)

Internal Comparability: Formal consistency. The County strongly resists the
Association’s proposal of a simple across-the-board increase which would leave the
employees in this bargaining unit on their own salary schedule and off the County-wide
“squared table” of steps and ranges. The County’s argument comes down to this: It really
is not practicable to manage a workforce of almost 15,000 employees, represented by vast
numbers of unions, without a unified salary schedule. The alternative-a different salary
schedule for each bargaining unit, even though many bargaining units include employees
engaged in essentially the same sort of work-would be a managerial nightmare.

The list of statutory factors to be considered by an interest arbitration panel begins
with “the constitutional and statutory authority of the employer;” and the County’s most
fundamental argument here is really an appeal to the statutory authority and responsibility
of a public employer to manage its workforce. It would be strange, in the face of that
listed factor, for an arbitration panel to ignore the fundamental fact that any effective
exercise of an employer’s managerial authority requires that employer to bring some
overall organization to the compensation of the workforce. The County’s “squared table”
is the sort of conceptual “cookie cutter” that provides such organization. This is largely a
matter of form: If the “squared table” is to be imposed, that simply means that
compensation disputes have to be translated into terms of disagreements about a
classification’s proper range on that table.

The County’s plea for formal consistency runs into a problem, however, on this
record, and that problem seems insurmountable. First, the temporal dimension of the
“squared table” consists of periodic cost-of-living increases of 90% of the increase in the
All-Cities CPI index. That is the COLA formula that the County has bargained into most
of its non-arbitrable unit contracts, and it is the down-year formula which the County
proposes in the case at hand. But, as the County’s own 2002 Study points out, the design
of the County’s compensation system-including that COLA formula-assures that it
will fall behind the market over time as interest arbitrable units, free of those constraints,
have not done. Second, the Company’s own study concludes that the County achieves a
market wage only at the very top of the squared table. Because this interest arbitrable
bargaining unit “must be paid at market wage” (as the 2002 Study so succinctly
summarizes the thrust of interest arbitration statutes), it cannot consistently be forced into
a compensation system that cannot keep pace with the market in both of these respects.³³
That may be the reason that the great majority of the County’s interest arbitrable
bargaining unit contracts use separate compensation matrixes rather than the County’s
squared table. No matter how sympathetic I may be with the County’s desire for
administrative consistency, it would be contrary to the spirit of the statute, and contrary to
the goal of maintaining general comparability, to place these employees on the County’s
squared table.

Internal Comparability: Substantive consistency. The County argues that one
significant comparable for these employees-perhaps the determinative comparable-
should be other County employees performing the same or similar services. In these
negotiations that proposition has been expressed by what TEA describes as the County’s
mantra, “An engineer is an engineer is an engineer;” and TEA finds itself forced to argue
against that apparent tautology.

There is an underlying conceptual divide between the parties on this issue. The
overall sense of the record is that at Metro the term “Engineer” was an accolade fully
deserved only by those who were certified as Professional Engineers. Every other
“engineer” employee was viewed as being somewhere in the long process of finally
achieving a PE. One result of that orientation is that 73% of the Transit Division
engineers and 63% of the Wastewater Division engineers hold a PE, while the next
highest concentration in the County’s workforce is 37% in Building and Land
Development while Road Services falls short of 20%. Another result is that the
“engineers” in a unit strongly oriented toward PE certification strenuously object to being
thrown into the same barrel as “engineers” in the rest of the County workforce, without
that orientation. To them, “an engineer” with a PE or on the way toward achieving one is
not at all “an engineer” who is satisfied with a BS or who has no undergraduate degree at
all; and the suggested equivalence is almost offensive.

The County, characterizes this difference in orientations as follows:

The engineering panel . . . had to decide between competing philosophies. On the
one hand, employees could be classified and compensated based upon the degrees or licenses
they held. On the other hand, employee classifications could be based upon the actual work
performed by the employees.³⁴ Post-hearing Brief at 11.

I must beg to doubt that the County ever seriously contemplated basing compensation
upon degrees or licenses held unless those degrees or licenses were required or preferred
for the performance of the work in question. With respect to the engineers at issue, this
substantive issue of internal consistency therefore comes down to a factual dispute over
whether the work done by the design and construction engineers in the Transportation
Section is substantially different from the work done by engineers elsewhere in the County
workforce.

The parties built a considerable record of the similarities and differences between
the work of engineers in the Roads Division and the work of engineers in the Transit
Division, mostly in terms of cost and complexity of the projects undertaken.³⁵
Nonetheless, it would be extremely difficult to decide, on the basis of that record, whether
the work of engineers in the Transportation Design and Construction section is
substantially different from the work of engineers elsewhere in the County’s workforce.
The source of that difficulty is pretty obvious: the arbitration panel is not composed of
managing or supervising engineers, which makes it pretty hard for us to tell whether the
work in question would be done more efficiently or would be done better by PE certified
engineers. But that is a systemic feature of all “wage and hour / classification” work: the
person responsible for such judgments usually has some expertise in the area of
employment classification work but lacks expertise in most or all of the particular work
specialties under consideration. That is why such work proceeds largely on the basis of
class descriptions. The managers and employees work out the class specifications-
keeping in mind that they will have to be able to hire on the basis of those class
specifications-and the classification analysts take those classification descriptions as
gospel. The case at hand is in no way peculiar in that regard: the most compelling
evidence in this area, as the Association argues, is the minimum qualifications and
preferences set out in the classification descriptions for engineers in this bargaining unit
and for engineers in the other County bargaining units.

There is no dispute in this record that the class descriptions for engineers in Roads
set out no substantial education or certification requirements at all; while the class
descriptions for engineers in the TEA unit include various education, experience, and PE
certification requirements.³⁶ In the face of that fact, we cannot accept the County’s claim
that there is really no difference in the services provided by engineers in those two
sections and that TEA engineers should be compensated just as Roads engineers in the
interest of internal consistency.³⁷ As far as this record shows-on the basis of the
conceded descriptions of the minimum requirements and preferences for the employees in
question-the County’s internal consistency argument does not really apply to the
engineering positions at issue.

That argument is far more persuasive when we turn to the rest of the bargaining
unit. For example, some of the employees at issue are fundamentally clerical. The record
does not show that their classification descriptions or duties are substantially different
from those of the County’s other employees in similar classifications. For those
employees, the County itself is an appropriate comparable and should be given great
weight in that role.³⁸

Private sector comparables. In a nutshell, TEA makes a compelling argument in
favor of considering private engineering firms as comparables, and the County makes a
compelling argument against doing so on the basis of this record. TEA points first to the
statutory language itself; and there is not much room for doubt that that language at least
leaves room for private sector comparables.³⁹ Moreover, in this particular case, the
private engineering firms which TEA proposes as comparables do not just do work that is
similar to the work of the bargaining unit, there is no dispute that they do exactly the
same work and that the “make/buy” decision about each project is made primarily on the
basis of the availability of personnel to do that project in-house on a timely schedule.

The problem with TEA’s proposal to add private sector comparables is that the
statute explicitly requires us to consider “compensation packages,” and the record
includes only part of the “packages” received by TEA’s proposed private sector
comparables.⁴⁰ Moreover, as far as the record shows, there is some reason to believe that
the missing parts of the “package” data-particularly insurance and retirement
benefits-would change the overall picture substantially. At the very least, we cannot
conclude that the lack of insurance benefit and retirement benefit data for the private
sector employers is clearly de minimus. In the absence of “compensation package” data
in the record for the private engineering firms, there is no way to consider private sector
comparables under RCW 41.56.492(2)

Public sector comparables. The touchstone to the selection of comparables, it
seems to us, should be the recognition that some sorts of compensation comparisons have
a lot of appeal in two-party negotiations and some do not. If Big Company told its union,
across the table, that no raises were justified for its 20,000 employees because a nearby
“mom and pop” competitor, with three employees, was not giving any raises, that
argument would be a waste of breath. Similarly, if a union argued that raises were
necessary for a workforce in Seattle because a couple of similar employers in Maine and
Florida had raised salaries, the employer would inevitably reply, “Why should we care?”
The most appealing comparisons in two-party negotiations are local and, to some extent,
similar in size. It is an obvious appeal to data about what the company’s current workers
could be getting for the same services if they changed to the company’s competitor just
down the block; and there is some obvious appeal to data about what the company would
have to pay for other local workers to perform such services. When one party or the other
starts to cite compensation found much farther away, at least a little bit of that appeal is
lost. That appeal brings with it an additional “hump” to get over: “...if the employees
moved out of town ...” or “...if we got employees to move here from elsewhere ...” So, too,
to a lesser extent, do appeals to data about much larger or much smaller employers or to
far richer or far poorer ones.

This obviously suggests the question, “How far is too far away?” To some extent,
that is exactly the same as the question of the geographic size of a particular employment
market. For custodians, it is probably the length of a bus ride; and for directors of
neonatal surgery it is probably national. In the collective bargaining context, it seems to
me, as long as there is a substantial labor market for the skills in question that is truly
local, i.e. that does not require relocation, data from the local area will always be
particularly compelling, and data from distances that would require relocation into or out
of the local area will always be far less appealing. The record in the case at hand shows
that there are enough local employees with the skills in question, and four reasonably
similar local employers, to limit our principal inquiry to compensation packages that these
employees could potentially access without relocation and to outside employees that the
County could potentially attract without their having to relocate.⁴¹ Those four are the City
of Seattle, the Port of Seattle, Sound Transit, and the City of Bellevue. In short, the most
compelling data in the record is that from similar employers in the greater metropolitan
Seattle area, particularly because the overwhelming majority of applicants for vacant
bargaining unit positions from 2002 to present have come from the greater Seattle
metropolitan area.

The parties actually agree on the comparability of Sound Transit, the Port of
Seattle, the City of Seattle, and the City of Bellevue (the last two being the largest cities
in the County); but each party proposes additions. The County would add Snohomish and
Pierce Counties and the Cities of Tacoma, Everett, Federal Way, Kent and Renton. The
Association objects to the disparity in size-primarily in terms of population- between
the County and each of those proposed comparables. The Association also objects that
there is not substantial similarity of the design and engineering work done by those
smaller public sector employers.

With respect to the County’s proposal to include the neighboring counties, the
Association also points out the substantial dissimilarity in the economic underpinnings of
these neighbors. Of course, there is really no Washington employer quite like King
County in many respects. King County accounts for well over 40% of the entire
Washington State employment picture; and about 52% of the entire State’s industry
earnings occur in King County. The record also shows that King County wages, on
average, are somewhat higher than wages in Snohomish County and substantially higher
than wages in Pierce County. King County’s recent employment history is summed up
this way in a recent Washington State University study:

King County average annual real per capita growth outpaced the state average during the
1970s (2.97% vs. 2.13%)) surpassed the state average during the 1980s (1.97% vs.
1.34%)) and topped the state average during the 1990s (3.52% vs. 2.26%).

Relative to nationwide real per capita growth, King County led the nation during the
1970s (2.97% vs. 2.58%), trailed the nation in the 1980s (1.97% vs. 2.06%), and
exceeded the nation in the 1990s (3.52% vs. 1.63%).

Pierce County’s personal income growth picture has been quite different:

Pierce County’s average annual real personal income growth fell below the state average
during the 1970s (3.76% vs. 4.63%), trailed [sic] the stare average during the 1980s (3.05%
vs. 3.05% [sic]), and fell below the state average during the 1990s (3.87% vs. 4.40%).

Snohomish County is rather in between:

Snohomish County’s average annual real per capita growth outpaced the State average
during the 1970s (3.26% vs. 2.73%), trailed the state during the 1980s (1.26% vs. 1.34%),
and fell below the state average during the 1990s (1.66% vs. 2.26%).

Moreover, King County is substantially greater than Pierce County or Snohomish County both
in population (1,737,000 vs. 701,000 and 606,000) and in population density (586hq. mile vs.
417 and 237); and the assessed valuation of the County’s transit service area is about ten
times the assessed valuation of unincorporated Snohomish and Pierce Counties.
Although the County argues strenuously that the comparables should certainly include
other counties, the statute does not require that conclusion, and the fact is that the
neighboring counties are really not substantially similar to King County in any relevant
and compelling respect.

With respect to the comparability of the smaller cities proposed by the County-
both in terms of population and complexity of engineering design efforts-the record
provides quite substantial support for the Association’s objections.

Four comparables-City of Seattle, Port of Seattle, Sound Transit and City of
Bellevue-are not very many. The obvious question is whether they are “just barely”
enough or “not quite” enough to resolve the dispute. If I were to add comparables, then
the obvious candidates would be the neighboring “metropolitan” Counties. But their
demographic and economic dissimilarities from King County would have to be balanced
by the addition of other comparables-far more distant-that are more similar to the
County in those respects. The end of that process-and not a very distant end, either-is
to entirely lose the primary appeal of “what I could get without relocating’’ and “who we
could hire right here in the immediate area.” In place of that immediacy, I would have to
engage in the sort of abstract “regional market” analysis that, it seems to me, always
comes in in second place in two-party negotiations across the bargaining table.
Considering the alternatives, then, I conclude that the four local comparables are just
barely enough; and the analysis below operates in terms of those four (plus the County
itself in some instances).

COST OF LIVING

TEA proposes to use the Seattle CPI. The County proposes the All Cities index.⁴²
TEA’s proposal runs up against the advice of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS):

The 26 metropolitan areas for which BLS publishes separate index series are by-products of
the U.S. City Average index. Metropolitan area indexes have a relatively small sample size
and, therefore, are subject to substantially larger sampling errors. Metropolitan area and
other sub-components of the national indexes (regions, size-classes)often exhibit greater
volatility than the national index. BLS strongly recommends that users adopt the U.S. City
Average CPI for use in escalator clauses. [Emphasis not in the original.]

But the County’s proposal to use the National All-Cities index runs up against its own
2002 Study which recognized that the Seattle CPI has trailed the Seattle index by an
average of almost 1% per year over the period from 1990 through 2000. In a sense, the
County’s arguments in this case seek “to have it both ways.” It argues strenuously against
TEA’s proposal to consider distant comparables, claiming that comparability should be
determined locally-which is correct in this case. But that argument somewhat conflicts
with its preference for the national CPI index. Although the record is not clear about
some of the comparable jurisdictions, the City of Seattle CBA is in the record, and the
City appears to be one of the local employers-as referenced by the 2002 Study-which
use the Seattle index. Similarly, the County’s general use of the national All-cities index
apparently does not extend to the County’s own interest-arbitrable bargaining units. On
that record, I cannot conclude that the statute’s general interest in maintaining the
comparability of these transit employees would be well served by departing from the
Seattle index. On the other hand, the County correctly points out that the 90% approach
has been a common feature of COLA language at least since the days of the Carter
administration; and that limitation is appropriate here as well. Similarly, nothing in the
record supports TEA’s proposal that the COLA formula should have a minimum but no
maximum; and I will therefore award the traditional 6% cap proposed by the County.

RECRUITMENT AND RETENTION

One of the most significant factors in setting compensation rates is the employee
turnover in the existing workforce. The two sides of this coin are recruitment and
retention. TEA agrees that there have not been significant retention problems in this unit
in the past. In fact, total turnover-including retirements-was about 5% in both 2001
and 2003 and was zero in 2002. But TEA argues that this is only “the lull before the
storm” and that, with respect to recruitment, the storm is already here. A great deal of
TEA’S recruitment and retention data, however, is actually comparability and market data
presented in another guise, the argument being that recruitment and retention problems
are bound to follow if the County falls far below the market. Still, there is some direct
evidence of recruitment problems. When the County posted an Electrical Engineer IV
opening in the Summer of 2001 there were no applicants who met the minimum paper
qualifications for the position. The February, 2002, reposting produced a single applicant
who insisted on coming in above the bottom step of the pay schedule and then took
another position, for more money, while that request was being considered. The County
again reposted the opening, and hired at the top of the schedule.⁴³

All in all, the County’s recent recruitment record shows slightly less than 50
openings from 1999 to the date of hearing, for which there were slightly more than 550
applicants.⁴⁴ About 30 of those were filled from within the County workforce. The
parties provided records of employee departures from the bargaining unit back to 1997.
Some of those forms show the classification of the employee and some do not. Of those
that do, based on testimony from TEA witnesses, four show departures to the Port of
Seattle, five show departures to Sound Transit, and ten show employees leaving for
positions with contractors or consultants. As one would expect, most of that final group
departed from higher-level classes.

TEA argues that the record shows recruitment problems on the horizon because the
County has had to hire some incoming positions at or near the top or the schedule. But the
individuals in question were also apparently at the top of their career professional
experience. This is not a unit which has traditionally hired only into the bottom classes
and has then promoted from within-as some police units do-and it is not compellingly
worrisome that, in a few instances, the County has had to hire at the top of its schedule in
order to get individuals with extremely long experience. All in all, it is difficult to
disagree with the County’s claim that if “TEA employees truly were 20% behind the
market ... there is simply no way the turnover rate would be as low as it is.” Post-hearing
Brief at 23.

COSTS, ABILITY TO PAY, and FISCAL CONSTRAINTS

Washington’s voters repealed the motor vehicle excise tax in 1998, which was a
major source of public transit funding; and the 2000 legislature responded by allowing
local governments to increase the dedicated transit sales tax rate from 0.6% to 0.9% with
approval of the people. (See RCW 82.14.045.) The County actually increased its rate by
0.2%, rather than 0.3%, which did not replace the entire revenue loss. (Although the
County has proposed to use the other 0.1% of sales tax authority to support funds lost to
the health and human services budget, it has not yet managed to get the required State
Legislative approval of that proposal.⁴⁵) The work of the Road Services Division is
supported by a separate levy which has traditionally been used only for road work in
unincorporated areas of the County.

Of the County’s 2004 total $2.9 billion budget, only $513 million is general fund
money (mostly going to law, safety and justice expenditures). The County faces a $24
million general fund deficit in 2004, following general fund deficits of $41 million in
2002 and $52 million in 2003, and general fund revenues continue to grow at about 2%
per year while the corresponding expenses grow at 56% per year. The County’s revenue
sources are divided between property tax (76%) and sales tax (22%). But the property tax
rate is capped at 1% per year growth (a cap not applicable to new construction); and sales
tax revenues have declined steadily since 2000 and are not predicted to return to 2000
levels in real dollars until mid-2005. Transit expenditures-along with Wastewater, Solid
Waste, and the Airport-come out of special enterprise funds (which make up about 19%
of the County’s total expenditures).⁴⁶

The County has taken substantial steps to stem this tide of red ink in the general
fund budget. Some have been organizational, in search of operating efficiencies, some
have been aimed at reducing personnel costs, which account for the overwhelming part of
the County’s expenditures. One example of the latter sort of step is the doubling of
employee insurance co-pays under various renegotiated collective bargaining agreements
beginning in 2002. The County has also sought ways to avoid perpetuating the general
fund support of services that come under enterprise funding or are supported by special
revenues. The major examples of that step are the imposition of $7 million in landfill
rents paid by the solid waste operation for the use of the Cedar Hills landfill (a declining
general fund asset), the shifting of $2 million from Roads funds to pay for Sheriff‘s traffic
enforcement, and the submission to the voters of a special parks levy (which shifted $12.7
million out of general fund expenditures). Despite all these shifts and economies,
however, there have been major budget cuts over the last two years, including $11.5
million cut from the Health and Human Services budget, $4 million from the Sheriff‘s
office, $2.4 million from the Prosecutor, $2.5 million from Public Defense, $7.3 from
Adult & Juvenile Detention, etc.

The Enterprise Fund, which supports the Transit Division and its approximately
4,000 employees, shares one fundamental with the general fund part of the budget: they
both rest largely on sales tax revenues. Sales tax revenues have been flat, at best, over the
last four years due largely to a general economic downturn in the Seattle metropolitan
area. Sales tax revenue accounts for 65-70% of the Division’s income; and those
revenues were flat from 2002 to 2003 (contrary to a 2003 budget that anticipated a $25
million increase). Fare box revenues account for most of the rest of the income; and they
declined from 2003 into the first part of 2004.⁴⁷ There is no doubt that the County was
once more optimistic about the near-term growth of mass transit. A six-year plan adopted
in 2002 projected the addition of 400,000 hours of bus service by 2007; but by the end of
2002, that projection had been reduced to 165,000 hours, and the 2004 budget no longer
projects even that limited expansion until 2007.

The first priority in Transit budgeting throughout the recent economic downturn
has been the preservation of service levels. That has required a substantial shift from the
capital fund side of the budget fund to the operating side. The County’s formal policy
still calls for a 25/75 division-with capital expenditures getting the 25%-but the
imperative of avoiding service cuts has forced the actual allocation down to about 5/95.⁴⁸
Although the Public Transit Fund has statutory bonding authority for capital projects, the
County has decided to delayed base expansions and now plans no new park-&-ride
facilities after the lots in process are completed.⁴⁹ Yet systematic operating costs continue
to rise: workers comp costs have increased by 44% since 2001 adding $13 million to
operating costs; and insurance has increased by 37%, adding almost another $10 million.
Design and construction work-which is the focus of the TEA bargaining unit-can
reasonably be projected to decline from about $100 million in 2004 down to about $35
million (in 2004 dollars) in 2007.

Neither party has provided exact costing data, even for its own proposal. The
County estimates the cost of its own proposal on the basis of an estimated 4.25% average
increase across the bargaining unit. On that basis, the County estimates the 2001 -2002
increase from its own proposal to be just over $217,000 and the three-year cumulative
cost to be almost $967,500.⁵⁰ Taking a similar approach, the County estimates the first
year cost increase from TEA’S proposal to be just over $964,000 and the cumulative
three-year cost to be just over $3,252,000. Those estimates make the first year difference
between the parties about $747,000 and the cumulative three-year difference to be a bit
over $2.25 million.⁵¹

Even though Transit is largely funded outside the County’s general fund, the
County argues persuasively that “Transit is not an island; it is part of King County.’’

The fact that Transit is operated through an enterprise fund does not mean that it is independent
from the County’s overall economic health and welfare. If funds dedicated to transit were
insufficient to fund operations, the County would certainly be in the position of needing to utilize
general funds to subsidize Transit. More fundamentally, it is not fair that employees who work in
an area with a somewhat better financial situation should be paid more than other employees, when the employees themselves have no control over the finances. Many vital County services have no income stream. Simply stated, an outside source of funding is not a measure of the worth of
employees. Post-hearing Brief at 18.

The Association proposes to confine the ability-to-pay analysis to the particular
funding of these employees, but it is not quite clear whether the statutory term “fiscal ,
constraints” (in RCW 41.56.492(2)(c)) should be so narrowly applied. The County’s past
success in shifting some costs from the general fund to enterprise funded activities
demonstrates that the separation between a public employer’s “different pockets” is, to
some extent, subject to that employer’s creativity. On the other hand, the comparative
fiscal health of the Transit Division-compared to the parts of the County funded
primarily from the general fund-is a direct and, presumably, intended consequence of
fiscal priorities established by the legislature. In other words, the legislature has paid
specific attention to the “fiscal restraints” applicable to transit operations, and it would be
strange to ignore the resulting apparent priorities.

Even when transit is considered as “an island,” however, the record makes it clear
that there are substantial fiscal constraints to be considered, and not just at some
indefinite time in the future, either. The shift from the historic 25/75 allocation of capital
to operating funds down to a 5/95 allocation is eloquent evidence that the economic
underpinnings of this bargaining unit-which comes out of the capital side of the
budget-are shrinking fast. If the analysis of comparability here justified the 19+%
increases proposed by TEA, then that fiscal reality might very well place some lesser limit
on an interest arbitration award. Because the comparability data supports only a
substantially smaller increase, however, the record does not convincingly argue for a
reduction of that increase on the basis of fiscal constraint.

INSURANCE

The statute requires the arbitration panel to consider “compensation packages,”
and the second primary part of these employees’ compensation package-insurance-is
the second issue in this case. There is a difference in the costs of the medical insurance
provided by the various comparable employers, but-except for differences in monthly
out-of-pocket costs-the record does not show that there is really a substantial difference
in the value of those insurance coverages to the employees in question.

With respect to monthly out-of-pocket costs, only one of the comparables requires
employees to make payments toward their insurance coverage. The City of Bellevue
administers its insurance program on a tiered basis, and employees pay up to $246 per
month toward their own insurance costs. But the record shows only the top tier cost and
does not show what the average out-of-pocket cost is for Bellevue employees. Even if
every employee paid $246 per month, that would still amount to something around 0.4%
of the average monthly salary for this bargaining unit; and the record does not show that
every Bellevue employee pays top tier out-of-pocket costs. In short, I must agree with the
Association that the record does not justify an insurance-based reduction in the pay rate
award as the compensation package for this bargaining unit.

THE FINAL NUMBERS

After identifying the proper comparables as the City of Seattle, the Port of Seattle,
the City of Bellevue, and Sound Transit, there are still seven substantial disputes to be
resolved before it is possible to do the compensation package comparison contemplated
by the statute.

Broadbanding v. Steps. First, some of the comparables structure their
compensation systems in the traditional “steps,” and some use a “broadband” approach.
One of the claimed virtues of the broadband system is that the center of the band should
move up so that employees seldom, if ever, actually reach the top of the band. In order to
function that way, broadbands must be broad, just as the name suggests, Le. the stretch
between the bottom and the top of the band must be relatively great. The stretch in the
County’s pay scale-the difference between the bottom of a range and the top-is 26.7%,
not counting the 5% longevity bonus. With that 5% addition, the total stretch is about
32%. By comparison, the stretch in the City of Seattle pay scale-another traditional
“step” compensation system-is only about 17% measured at the highest pay grade; and
the stretch in Bellevue’s schedule is about 38%.⁵² Sound Transit, on the other hand, is a
true broadband schedule, stating only the mid-point with a note that the range consists of
“+/- 20% of midpoint,” which makes the stretch 40%;⁵³ and the Port of Seattle, similarly,
exhibits a full 50% broadband approach. The problem comes when we try to use “top
step” numbers of traditional “step” schedules and broadband schedules together.

The first question is whether any adjustment at all is really necessary. TEA
naturally urges the use of the top of the broadbands as the “top step” numbers for the Port
and for Sound Transit. But one of the major points of using a broadband system, to
repeat, is that employees should seldom if ever actually reach the top of a band, so using
those top numbers would certainly introduce artificial inflation for those comparators.⁵⁴
If some adjustment is necessary, then, there are two obvious candidates, neither of which
is entirely satisfactory. First, the County proposes to avoid the whole problem by focusing
on midpoints rather than on maximums. But there are two problems with that approach:
too many of the employees in this unit are actually at the top step, and the County’s 2002
Report points out that it is only the top of the County’s compensation schedule in general
that achieves the market. An analysis in terms of range midpoints makes perfectly good
sense if the jurisdiction in question has a workforce which is spread out over the range.
In the case at hand, however, a vastly disproportionate percentage of bargaining unit
employees are at (or above) the top steps of their ranges. Moreover, the County’s 2002
Study strongly suggests that in general only the tops of the County’s pay ranges bear a
close relationship to “the market.” Those two considerations really require the
comparisons in this case to proceed in terms of “top step” compensation rather than in
terms of mid points as the County suggests.

The second alternative is to limit the broadband top to the highest compensation
actually paid. Both parties offered data on the actual top pay rates for the Port of Seattle
and for Sound Transit; and I have used the top rates actually paid-rather than the tops of
the bands-for the analysis below. (There is a third alternative, which is to shrink the
broadbands to the same “stretch” as the County’s ranges, i.e, in this case, to 33% around
their stated midpoints. I ran the numbers that way, and the result puts the County’s
compensation rates substantially further behind than does the analysis below. Because
both methods of adjusting broadband numbers are somewhat artificial, I find the use of
the highest actually paid rates presents a more accurate picture of those comparables.)

Which classifications to sample? The second puzzle is which classifications
should be sampled to determine the overall relative compensation status of the bargaining
unit. In the usual uniformed services interest arbitration, the employees at issue all fall
within a single classification series, and there is usually no proposal to change the
structure of the series itself, so it makes sense to pick a single, representative class for
purposes of comparing the entire workforce.⁵⁵ The TEA bargaining unit, however, is
composed of several discrete classification series, so that approach is not appropriate.

The parties differ substantially on this issue. The County-in lieu of its fondest
hope of completely integrating this bargaining unit into the general classification and pay
schemes for the general County workforce-proposes at least a class-by-class analysis,
giving extreme weight to the County itself as a comparable. The County particularly
urges this approach for those employees who have duties and responsibilities which are
quite similar to large numbers of other County employees. For example, the County
points out that the clerical employees in this wall-to-wall unit are physically stationed
among other County employees doing essentially the identical work but organized into
other bargaining units. Doing the same work, the County argues, certainly should result
in getting the same pay. The Association, on the other hand, proposes a common, across-
the-board approach to compensation, pointing out that PERC has conclusively determined
that this is a single bargaining unit.

The class-by-class analysis proposed by the County, even on the voluminous
record before me, is not a practical possibility. But the fact that it is not possible, on this
record, to produce a reasonably trustworthy class-by-class analysis certainly should not be
construed as a rejection of the County’s argument that doing the identical work as one’s
neighbor argues strongly for getting at least similar pay. At least with respect to the
nonprofessional employees in the unit-and particularly with respect to the clerical
employees-that argument might well be compelling if the record provided the basis for
the analysis it required.⁵⁶ But the comparability analysis of any given class in the unit
requires, first, a determination of exactly which classes correspond to that County class in
each of the comparables workforces. The record before me includes volumes of job
descriptions, so it is theoretically possible to do that sort of matching on paper; but the
potential for error between the paper matching and the real world would be very great.⁵⁷
Both of the party-appointed members of the arbitration panel urged the neutral member to
avoid an over-reliance on such paper matching.⁵⁸

What that leaves, however, is a necessary reliance on the work done by the
Committee: that is the only evidence in the record that reflects sound and considered
judgments about the work actually performed by bargaining unit members and the
matching of that work to class descriptions for the comparable workforces. After the
hearing closed, I tentatively identified the probable comparables, and the party-appointed
arbitrators-by joint agreement of the parties-went back to the Committee for an
additional round of discussions focusing particularly on those comparables.⁵⁹ The result
of that process was received into evidence by stipulation; and that constitutes the
Engineering Classifications matches in the first table below. The second table below
addresses the two other classification series addressed by the Committee, i.e.
Construction Management and Designer. Although the record is not perfectly clear, I
take these matches to reflect the Committee’s conclusions about these classes. With
respect to these two, non-engineer series, I have included the County itself as an additional
comparable. I have used the County’s own proposed 2003 pay rates, because those rates
correspond to the ranges which the County claims to be proper for these classes.

Employees in the Engineer classifications make up not quite half of this bargaining
unit (31 out of 74). Construction Management and Design account for another 24
employees, making a total of 55, or 74% of the entire bargaining unit. That is enough of
a sample to support a reasonably dependable conclusion about the overall comparable
compensation of the bargaining unit in general. (Some classes are currently empty: i.e.
Engineer I, Designer I, and Construction Management V and VI. The record is not clear
about exactly why each of those classes is currently empty. It may be that such
employees are no longer hired or used by the Department; or it may be that a class just
happens to be unoccupied at the moment. Rather than averaging over currently-empty
classes, however, I have restricted the analysis to those classes with at least one current
incumbent.) The salary increase award, therefore, is an average of the measurements of
comparable compensation packages for these classes, based on the class matching done
by the Committee.

Simple averages or weighted averages? The County argues that the averaging
should be “weighted” to reflect how many County employees are currently in each of the
classes involved.⁶⁰ One problem with that approach, as TEA points out, is that it is
somewhat adventitious, depending on today’s workforce, which may differ substantially
from yesterday’s or tomorrow’s. Moreover, the wage award is supposed to be an
adjustment based on the market, which the interest arbitration statute says is to be
determined by making comparisons between like employers. If a weighted average is
used, the market average is subject to sizable deviations solely based on how many people
are in each classification at one particular snapshot in time. Suppose, for instance, that
before this arbitration King County had hired four new Engineer IIs. Engineer IIs are
much further behind their market average than most other series and classifications in this
bargaining unit. The overall “weighted” average would change significantly due to that
change in the workforce; but the market itself would not have changed. Indeed, the
County does not propose a “weighted” approach to determining the rest of the market.
Such an approach would determine the average compensation for an Engineer 11, for
example, by multiplying the total number of such employees of each employer by the
appropriate salary for that employer, adding up all those products, and then dividing by
the grand total number of Engineer 11s for all of the comparable employers. That
approach would make considerable sense, because a comparable employer who employs
50 Engineer IIs, for example, certainly has more impact on the market than another
comparable employer who employs only 10. But neither party proposes to do the market
analysis that way in the case at hand. (In fact, I have never seen any public sector interest
arbitration decision anywhere in the Northwest that took that approach.) Because we are
averaging employers-and not employees-for the comparables, therefore, it is hard to
justify averaging employees-i.e. a “weighted” average approach-when it comes to the
final step of the analysis.

City of Seattle and Seattle City Light. The Association proposes to add Seattle
City Light to the list of local comparables. The County objects that Seattle City Light is a
sub-agency of the City of Seattle-even though the specialized function of Seattle City
Light causes it to have some classifications which the City lacks-and the addition of
Seattle City light as an additional comparable would have the effect of counting the City
of Seattle twice.⁶¹ The County is apparently correct in pointing out that Seattle City Light
is simply a division of the City of Seattle. (In fact, the inclusion of Seattle City Light as
part of the City of Seattle makes the City overall a more compelling comparable for King
County.) If Seattle City Light is considered part of the City, however, then, if there is a
match at the City and at Seattle City light, the proper top match is the higher paid of those
two classes, and those higher matches are used in the charts below.⁶²

Port of Seattle workweek. There is no dispute that Port of Seattle employees have
a 37.5 hour workweek, rather than the 40 hour week found at the County and at the other
comparable employers. Most of the Port of Seattle employees corresponding to TEA
employees are exempt from FLSA requirements. I have therefore made no correction to
change their stated annual salary rates into hourly rates, even though TEA urges such a
“correction.” To do so would require me to convert the stated annual rate-i.e. the rate
which the Port states as the compensation for those employees-into an hourly rate (by
dividing it by the annualized hours for a 37.5 hour week) and then multiplying it by the
annualized hours for a 40 hour week. In short, the adjustment would add not quite 7% to
the Port of Seattle numbers. That proposed correction is not justified here, particularly
considering that most of these employees are FLSA exempt as professional employees
and professional employees are not, generally, held closely to the clock.

The “snapshot” date. There are two issues here. First, the sort of comparison
contemplated by the statute requires the selection of a “snapshot” date for purposes of
comparison. In the case at hand, as usual, the parties argue for different snapshot dates
throughout the period at issue based on the various dates when rate changes went into
effect at the County and when rate changes went into effect for the various comparable
employers. The selection of a snapshot date is inevitably arbitrary to some extent, a
matter of convenience which should not be disturbed as long as the particular point
chosen does not greatly deform the comparison; and the selection of 1/1/03 in this case
does not do so.

Second, this case involves compensation rates from 2001 (where the bargaining
unit employees are now) to 2004 (the end of the contract at issue). The record does not
include equally extensive compensation data for each of those years. In particular, the
original “Salary Schedule and Compensation Plan” for the City of Seattle is most readily
assessable in the 2003 version. I have therefore used 2003 as the measuring year; and the
initial wage rate increases awarded are those that bring the bargaining unit up to
comparability-with the addition of the appropriate COLA increase-as of 2003. (To put
it another way, one starts with comparison of current bargaining unit rates with the
comparable 2003 rates and then backs out the appropriate COLA to get to the appropriate
initial increase.) Consistent with that pattern, I have used the County’s proposed range
placements at the 2003 rates as the County internally comparable rates because those are
the rates that the Company argues these employees should have received in 2003 if their
pay schedule were properly integrated with the Company’s squared table.

The “real top:” Merit pay. Finally, there is a fundamental dispute between the
parties over the identification of the “top” of the County’s own pay schedule. The
County’s pay plan includes up to 5% of “merit” pay above the top of the squared table
and above the apparent top of the TEA employees’ current schedule (apart from the
squared table). Comparison of salary schedules “at the top” of a traditional step schedule
usually operates in terms of the highest pay rate that is available to an employee based on
longevity alone.⁶³ The designation of a plan as “merit” pay suggests that longevity alone
would not trigger that additional compensation; and, on paper, the County’s merit pay
plan does not appear to qualify: For movement above Step 10 the plan requires an
evaluation rating of “outstanding” in two consecutive years. But that apparent
impediment is belied by the uncontested facts in the record: Of the 74 employees in the
bargaining unit, 33 receive merit pay and are above the top of their apparent pay schedule.
In fact, over the entire three-year period at issue in this case, 33 unit employees have been
paid at the merit step above the apparent top of the schedule. Over that same period, only
one employee who was eligible for merit pay on the basis of longevity alone has actually
had his or her pay restricted to the top of the apparent schedule.⁶⁴ In light of that
concentration of almost half of the bargaining unit above the stated top of the schedule, it
would be strange to use those schedule tops as the top pay rates and to ignore what are
essentially “merit steps."⁶⁵ I will therefore include that proposal in the award in this case
and use the merit steps-i.e. 5% above the stated top of the schedules-as the maximum
pay rates. In order to be consistent, that same approach must be applied to the County’s
own squared table numbers for those classes for which the County is an appropriate
comparable.

The tables. The two following tables, then, generally show the Committee’s class
matches at the comparable employers.

COMPARISON TABLES

City of Seattle
Port of Seattle
Sound Transit
Bellevue
Average
King County Now
Difference

Eng. II
Engn. Assoc.
65,897
Engn.
70,608
68,253
61,152
11.61%

Eng. III
Design Engn.^C
75,462
Civil Engn.^A
74,301
Sr. Engn., Transport.
81,936
77,233
72,422
6.64%

Eng. IV
Elec. Pwr Syst. Engn.^D
79,942
Disputed^B
Sr. Civil Engn. Utilities^A
78,608
Sr. Engn., Utilities
81,936
80,162
80,153
0.01%

Eng. V
Elec. Pwr Sys. Engn., Principal^D.
84,249
Engn. Design Coord.^C
98,777
Disputed^B
Engn. Supv.
90,480
91,169
84,280
8.17%

Eng. VI
Manager II
85,921
Mgr. Design Services
102,378
Disputed^B
Engn. Mrg.
99,924
96,074
88,670
8.35%

Average difference
for Engineer classifications:
6.96%

Notes on the first table.
A. This appears to be the highest rate as of 1/1/03.
B. The Committee could not agree on a match; and the record provided no basis on which to resolve the dispute.
C. There is a dispute in the record about the highest rate actually paid in these classes. The County's data shows
$65,729, $86,035, and $89,174;and TEA'S shows $75,462, $89,779, and $102,378. TEA's data is slightly more detailed, and I adopt
those figures.
D. Seattle City Light class.

2003: Top Step & Top Actual Salary: Other Classifications

City of Seattle/Seattle City Light
Port of Seattle
Sound Transit
Bellevue
King County (2003)^A
Ave.
King County
Difference

Cons. Mgr. II
C E Spec. Associate
61,963
Const. Inspect.
51,305
Const. Project Inspect
58,008
54
62,314
58,398
55,211
5.77%

CM III
Sr. Inspect
58,473
Sr. Const Project Inspect
64,056
59
70,159
64,229
64,319
-0.14%

CM IV
Sr. Inspect
58,473
63
77,141
76,568
76,157
0.54%

Dsgn. II
CE Spec Asst. II
74,027
Asst. Resident Engn.
47
52,782
52,495
44,354
18.35%

Dsgn. III
CE Spec. Associate
61,963
Engn. Tech.
55,200
52
59,527
58,863
51,586
14.11%

Dsng. IV
CE Spec Sr.
69,846
Eng. CAD
53,542
54
62,314
61,901
55,211
12.12%

Dsgn. V
CE Spec Supervisor
61,963
59
70,159
66,061
61,152
8.03%

Dsgn. VI
62
72,422

Average for Construction
Mgr. and Designer
Classifications:
8.40%

Average for all three
classification series
(12 classifications):
7.80%

Notes to the second table
A. These numbers are the top of the ranges (shown on the left) which the County identifies
as the appropriate (Le. comparable) placement for each class on the squared table
(increasing the 2002 top by 2.0% to get 2003).
B. The County proposes an alternate match; but this appears to be the best fit (on the limited
record before me).
C. I agree with the County that this appears to be a better match on this record,
D. I agree with TEA that this appears to be a better match on this record.
E. There is insufficient data to assign a rate to Designer VI.

Backwards from 2003. The overall conclusion of the above analysis is that the
County’s 2001 compensation rate for this bargaining unit in general was 7.8% behind the
average for comparable employees in 2003. Between the beginning of the period at issue
in this case and the beginning of calendar 2003, therefore, the rates must come up a total
of 7.8%. Backing that total off by the 2% increase from 2002 to 2003 yields an initial
increase of 5.8%. Nothing in the record adequately supports any departure from those
increases in light of the factors set out in the statute.

OTHER ISSUES

TEA proposes to increase substantially the premiums paid for a PE license. But
the prevalence of PES and the role a PE plays in the Engineer classifications was what
TEA successfully argued to be the distinguishing feature of these engineers, preventing
their comparison with other similarly-titled County employees. It is not quite consistent to
propose to add on an additional premium for a characteristic which TEA offers as
definitive of the group. Moreover, and quite conclusively, none of the comparables
provides such premiums. On the basis of this record, therefore, there is no adequate
reason for departing from the current PE premiums established by County ordinance.

The across-the-board increase awarded here has the unfortunate result of
perpetuating Metro’s salary structure for these County employees. But that is a
consequence of the nature of the interest arbitration process and of the record before me.
It should not be construed as a recognition that Metro’s old salary structure has any
intrinsic appeal for this bargaining unit. These are now County employees. The
forthcoming revision of their class specifications may show (depending on how those
class specs are administered) that the County is a proper comparable even for the
Engineer classes. The across-the-board ‘average of averages’ approach taken here is far
from elegant and is recommended primarily by the virtue of providing a resolution of the
dispute on the basis of the record before me. Subsequent years of negotiations-or
subsequent interest arbitration awards-may well focus on one or more particular class
series and may substantially alter the relationships among the classes which were
established long ago by Metro. Nothing in the record before me suggests that such
changes would be inappropriate or contrary either to the letter or to the spirit of the
applicable interest arbitration statute.

AWARD

The contract shall include the parties’ various tentative agreements and the
following article on WAGES:

1. 2002 Wage Rate. Effective February 4, 2002, the pay for all classifications in the bargaining
unit shall be increased across the board above the rates in effect as of February 3, 2002, by
5.8%.

2. 2003 Wage Rate. Effective January 1, 2003, the pay for all classifications in the bargaining
unit shall be increased across the board by 2.0%.

3. 2004 Wage Rate. Effective January 1, 2004, the pay for all classifications in the bargaining
unit shall be increased by a percentage equal to 90% of the increase in the Seattle CPI index
(from June to June) with a minimum increase of 2% and a maximum increase of 6%.

The County shall promptly make the members of the bargaining unit whole as
measured by that contract language.

Respectfully submitted,

_____________________ ___________________ _____________________
Howell L. Lankford Chris Casillas David Levin
Neutral Arbitrator TEA-appointed County-appointed
Arbitrator Arbitrator

CONCURRING OPINION

For reasons set forth below, I find that I am unable to sign the majority decision.
Although I can concur in the result, I must respectfully submit that the contradictions in
the rationale offered as well as the deviations from arbitral precedent, makes it impossible
for me to join in the decision itself. The rationale, in my opinion, very possibly could not
stand a legal challenge were the Technical Employees Association to make one in light of
the internal inconsistencies with the award as it relates to merit pay.

I agree with our Arbitrator’s assessment that the Award “should do no harm.”
Even though it was essentially asked for by King County, our Arbitrator’s decision to
include merit pay as if it were just another step in the salary system violates that test
because it is not only at variance with the parties tentative agreement which separately
resolved that issue, but more fundamentally it is the death knell of any true merit pay
system.

Our Arbitrator concluded that the merit pay system was a “paper tiger” although
that is more based on implied conclusions rather then being supported in the record.
Regardless, the decision to treat merit pay as yet another top step effectively means the
end of that program. No doubt, TEA will propose incorporating that into the step system
and the County will be powerless to resist such a proposal. The County in future
negotiations and arbitrations will not be able to credibly claim that these steps should be
anything other than automatic given the stance they have taken here which was
unfortunately ratified by our Arbitrator.

In using the merit pay system to calculate the top step wage of TEA members, the
award suddenly takes on a hue of capriciousness, in part, because it is in contravention of
the record. King County and TEA, after submitting different proposals on this issue of
merit pay, were able to reach a tentative agreement on the merit pay system during the
hearing, which essentially memorialized the past practice between the parties. This
practice, which is documented in the record, evidences a system that is discretionary and
requires these professional employees who are members of TEA to achieve outstanding
ratings in order to receive this pay. However, the neutral arbitrator has decided to use the
5% merit pay to determine the top step wage of TEA members, and, in effect, implicitly
changes the merit pay system to a guaranteed pay as an additional step. While the
intuitive sense of our arbitrator with respect to this program may or may not be accurate,
it is not supported in the record and is at odds with the tentative agreement on merit pay,
which sets up an inherent conflict in the agreement. For that reason it opens the award up
to a legal challenge, which is why I cannot support the logic of its inclusion.

As I had pointed out when the issue of credit for merit pay surfaced in the 11th
hour (we had proceeded through multiple drafts of decisions with multiple calculations of
the wage gap with merit pay never entering the picture until the very final draft) I pointed
out that other jurisdictions offered other forms of compensation including overtime and
other special pays which offered equal or likely greater compensation than the County
merit pay plan. It is an error in the decision to simply ignore these other pays. Whether a
particular agency decides to call its particular system merit pay or longevity pay, they
both have the same effect of allowing employees to move beyond the stated top of the
pay scale. The failure to include the systems used by these other agencies to achieve the
same goals creates imbalance in the award. Clearly the merit pay received in Sound
Transit would have to be incorporated in these comparative calculations if they are to be
sound and reasonable. Also, it is apparent that the merit pay program is a reward for hard
and sometimes long work and since the employees in this bargaining unit do not receive
any overtime pay, merit pay is a partial substitute for that benefit.

And partial it is. As I explained when this merit pay credit notion surfaced at the
last minute, the overtime compensation received in other bargaining units likely far
exceeds the average amount of merit pay received in the TEA bargaining unit.

I have to conclude the merit pay analysis contradicts two other parts of our
Arbitrator’s decision. First, our Arbitrator properly noted that the bargaining unit
members were already at a substantial disadvantage just comparing the formal top step of
ten years to other units where the employees typically top out in three to five years. Our
Arbitrator properly pointed out that the County’s own wage study had concluded that an
elongated pay step system was one of the primary reasons the County was behind the
market in a wide range of job classifications, including Engineers. So to then add on top
of that ten year step system merit pay as an artificial top step which requires a minimum
of two additional years, as was done here, and then to compare that to employees in other
bargaining units with three, four or five years of service is simply inappropriate and
unfair. Of course that is before one weighs the fact that merit pay can be lost and then
takes two more years to re-earn.

I cannot share our Arbitrator’s perspective that in previous arbitration decisions
the top of the scale in one jurisdiction is invariably compared to the top of the scale of the
comparables. In fact, I think arbitral precedent indicates steps are compared in that
fashion only when the top of the scale is relative shortly (for example within five years)
and consistent in duration with the pay step systems of the other comparables. That
obviously was not the case here. Arbitrators have not typically counted longevity
premiums as yet another wage step for purposes of computing the “average” to determine
the size of the wage gap. True, premiums such as longevity have been considered but as
a special form of pay along with other pays and premiums and not as just another step.

The second major inconsistency in the Decision relative to the merit pay credit
was the conclusion regarding the handling of private sector consulting firm salaries. Our
Arbitrator properly concluded that an appropriate reading of the interest arbitration
statute required the comparison to private sector firms engaging like personnel. Our
Arbitrator ultimately did not count these personnel into the final averages because of the
absence of total compensation data. I see it as a reversal of course to then count into the
average a special pay in the form of the merit pay when the amounts available in similar
incentive programs in other jurisdictions - whether they be deemed pay for performance
programs or more overtime - have not been included. If our Arbitrator held TEA to a
burden of proof on private sector special compensation, he should have done likewise to
the County on the other comparables. The failure to apply an equal reasoning process
across the body of the majority opinion undermines its intellectual integrity.

The final Decision results in a windfall for the County. Even the County argued
in their brief for only a 4% credit so the ultimate decision added an extra point to that
request. The 4% figure was not merely the result of some academic adventure by the
County to find an average, but was an implicit acknowledgment that not even they could
argue the full 5% be applied because of the nature of the merit pay program and that not
everyone in the bargaining unit receives this premium. I believe the true average wage
gap presented working in 2002 is somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 to 13%, and I
think the original calculations performed by our Arbitrator had confirmed this result. It is
undisputed that a majority of the bargaining unit does not receive merit pay whereas the
special pay programs offered elsewhere appear to be available to the entire unit. This
Award does not even remotely address the magnitude of that discrepancy.

I concur in the result to the extent that the comparables identified fairly reflect the
statute even though I think TEA’S West Coast model of comparability was a more true
reflection of the statute. I also concur that the modest wage increases awarded here put
TEA members on their way toward closing the market wage gap. What I cannot concur
in is the analysis which inappropriately credits the County for merit pay, especially in this
manner, and particularly to the extent that the Decision could possibly be read to imply
that the wages bring the members up to 2002 wage parity. If our Arbitrator had
concluded that a wage increase in excess of that was simply too rich in a single contract,
it would have been better to have made that the rationale rather than what I can only see
as a somewhat artificial and last minute deflation of the real wage gap.

I believe there are some other methodology issues that could be disputed such as
the undervaluing of Sound Transit and Port of Seattle compensation by the artificial wage
range applied, the disregard of the shorter work week for Port employees, the failure to
include a list of the existing classifications in the contract language even though the issue
was presented and had to be decided, but I need not elaborate on all those points here.
The primary defect in the Award, and one which only appeared at the very end of the
process was the merit pay calculation. Crediting the County as our Arbitrator did
realistically restricts the bargaining freedom in the next round of negotiations where the
“merit pay” now labeled as a “paper tiger” will have to be incorporated into the step
system. It is now predictable that the focus of future negotiations necessarily will be in
reducing the steps to a 3-5 year range as well as overtime compensation to make up for
the effective loss of merit pay.

The County managers who supervise this professional body of work might not
have wanted this result either, but the agenda of King County OHRM to argue for the
lowest possible wage by any possible means is at cross purposes of those department
managerial concerns. Regardless, the County will now get what it has effectively asked
for - the treatment of merit pay as nothing more and nothing less than an automatic step.
The County simply is not entitled to have its cake and eat it too.

As a result, this Award restricts the realistic freedom of the parties in a manner
greater than it should have. It would have been better to have increased the wages within
the existing pay system without the last minute contrivance of treating merit pay as if it
was just another step in that system. By so doing, the status quo has been irreversibly
altered and the next contract will result in compensation system looking much different
than the current one.

For all these reasons, I cannot join in the reasoning presented in the Decision and
Concur only in the result.

___________________________
Christopher J. Casillas
TEA-appointed Arbitrator

Footnotes
¹The County filed a ULP complaint over some of the Association’s proposal
between the first and second series of hearing days. In response, TEA amended its
proposal-eliminating a part of the previously proposed retroactivity-before the second
series of hearing days began. The parties agree that the Association’s current, amended
proposal is properly before the arbitrators.
²That number includes about eight long-term temporary employees, who are
included in the bargaining unit.
³The Engineers in Metro’s Technical Services division had to choose between
coming into TEA or into waste water in the County’s workforce. The same union that
represents the employees at issue here also represents the (previously Metro) County waste
water employees in a separate bargaining unit which is not eligible for interest arbitration.
⁴I will use the terms “licensed engineer,” “professional engineer,” and “registered
engineer” interchangeably.
⁵Nonrepresented employees did not get the retroactivity.
⁶For example, the class comp revisions made these title changes: Engineering Tech
(ET) 1 became Assistant Engineering Tech, ET2 became Associate ET, ET3 became ET1,
Engineer (E) 1 became E2, Senior Engineer became E3, Supervising Engineer became E4,
and Managing Engineer remained Managing Engineer.
⁷Classification schemes are, perhaps above all else, management tools for
imposing some sensible picture on a huge workforce. One of the basic, systemic issues that
always arises in designing a classification scheme for a workforce as large as the County’s is,
“How many classifications shall there be?” Having a vast number of classifications allows
each classification description to narrowly describe the work done by each small group of
employees, but having a vast number of classifications obscures, rather than expresses, the
similarities of the work done by many of those small groups. Having a tiny number of
classifications has the opposite virtue and the opposite vice. When the County designed its
new class comp scheme, it generally tried to reduce the number of classifications across the
County workforce; and the result, of course, is that each new classification title covers
employees who used to have a variety of class titles. The County’s new classification
“engineer,” therefore, covers employees in this bargaining unit who used to be in the Metro
classifications “Designer,” “Construction Manager,” and “Project Control,” as well as in
“Engineer.”
⁸The “uniformed services” provision recognizes difference in categories of
population (41.56.030(7)); and the transit service provision does not.
⁹Bargaining unit sizes range from almost 2,700 down to three (with about 17 units
in the single digit range).
¹⁰This list of Departments does not include the “County” employees who are also
responsible to some other elected official such as of the Assessor, the Prosecuting Attorney,
the Superior and District Courts, and the Sheriff; nor does it count the employees of the
County Council itself.
¹¹The County also does such work for various cities under contract.
¹²Most of the class comp design was apparently done in-house, although the
County did hire Ernest & Young as consultant.
¹³This quite truncates the extensive litigation history of these parties-both in a
series of representation cases and in a series of unfair labor practice complaints-leading up
to this interest arbitration. Those various cases have been back and forth on numerous
occasions among PERC’s Executive Director, PERC itself, the Superior Court and the Court
of Appeals.
¹⁴Two other unions were involved in the recognition agreement, because TEA had
once proposed bargaining units that would have included employees represented by those
unions in other County bargaining units.
¹⁵The recognized Waste Water unit is also essentially wall-to-wall and is about
three times the size of the units at issue here. Negotiations for that unit are now in
mediation, and the County’s proposal there is the same as its proposal here (including
leaving the same classification series unchanged from the old Metro status quo).
¹⁶The parties did not agree-and still do not agree-about whether that proposal to
implement the new class comp system was a mandatory matter for negotiations at all.
¹⁷The class comp implementation process included an appeal procedure, and there
are no transition issues in the case at hand.
¹⁸All new hires in the last five years were required to have an EIT Certificate.
¹⁹Under the new class comp system, an Engineer IV would not be required to have
be a PE.
²⁰There are three Managing Engineers: Engineering Construction Services,
Program/Project Management, and Engineering Design. The Engineering Design manager is
responsible for the supervising engineers in the Electrical, Civil, Mechanical and Structural
sections.
²¹There are no Designer Is, and the Committee was unable to find a class
description
²²The Committee generally agreed that a Designer VI should be at the same pay
rate as an Engineer III.
²³The County objects that TEA did not identify its exact proposed private sector
comparables until very shortly before the interest arbitration hearing began. There is no
dispute about that timing. While such late identification might well be a problem in many
interest arbitration proceedings, the hearing in the case at hand began in early March and
then resumed in late April, and the County does not claim that it had inadequate opportunity
to prepare its response to TEA’S proposed private sector comparables.
²⁴Projects over $10 million are generally required to include an outside
construction management firm.
²⁵The determination of what projects are put up for outside bids and what projects
are done in-house is apparently made on the basis of the size of the project in question and
the varying workload of the bargaining unit.
²⁶At least, TEA did not provide comparability data for contractor employees doing
work similar to the County’s Administrative Specialist series or Project Assistants. It is not
entirely clear from the record, but the contractors costs for such personnel may be part of the
built-in overhead rate in the umbrella Work Order contracts.
²⁷These “matches” are supported by the contractor employee resumes and the
minimum qualifications for the County classifications. The matching was a labor-intensive
process, done by TEA. The County questioned the compiler of this data extensively at
hearing, and the process she used appears to have been careful and thorough; although that
cannot make up for the fact that the numbers of comparators are rather small.
²⁸Neither party proposes comparison with the University of Washington or with
the State.
²⁹The numbers shown for percentages difference between the average (mean) and
the County rate are not those set out on the County exhibits because the County sometimes
divided the difference by the average wage and sometimes divided it by the County wage.
The percentages shown here are all in terms of the County’s wage rate.
³⁰This is a sort of difference that nobody in the labor and employment business can
profess to be ignorant of. At the beginning of the American labor movement, it was
somewhat similar to the difference between the AFL and the CIO. If, for example, a plant
absolutely must have a mold maker, and there are only three in the region, then-as the AFL
recognized-a union of those three has as much or more bargaining power than the CIO-style
union of the plant’s other 1,000 employees. Similarly, the County’s reference to “the relative
bargaining strength of the parties,” really makes sense only in the context of the legislature’s
judgment that the prospect of strikes by transit employees is quite unacceptable. That
fundamental fact, it seems to me, makes it unhelpful to propose to explain an interest
arbitrator’s role in terms of the “bargaining power” of the parties.
³¹The County’s excellent Post-hearing Brief valiantly attempts to neutralize the
2002 Study (p. 47, note 46). That project runs into two stumbling blocks. First, the 2002
Study really appears to be an official pronouncement of the County: it is, after all, authorized
and required by local ordinance. Second, the choices of scope and methodology was entirely
left up to the County, so the County really should not now be heard to criticize those choices.
In short, the 2002 Study, an official pronouncement of the County, appears rigorous on its
face; it is being used here for a purpose quite similar to that apparently intended by its
authorizing legislation, and the County is simply stuck with it.
³²The other compelling consideration behind that conclusion is that such a high
percentage of unit employees are on (or above) the top step.
³³As TEA and the 2002 Study both note, other interest arbitrators have reached the
same conclusion when addressing other interest arbitrable bargaining units.
³⁴The Association offers quite a different description of the same elephant:
“Local 17 effectively advocated for the majority of its members in gaming the class-comp
process to obtain for its engineering technicians and support people a large raise.” (Post-
hearing Brief at 10.)
³⁵It appears from this record that a substantial part of the work done by TEA
employees is quite comparable to a substantial part of the work done by employees in the
Roads Division. But it also appears that at least some of the work done by TEA
employees is substantially more varied and complex than the work of the Roads Division.
The size of the projects illustrates that difference: the largest Roads Division projects are
in the $30 million range, whereas the TEA unit is now involved in a $100 million project.
³⁶Classification descriptions are not determinative with respect to such issues.
For example, when a class description is silent but the record shows that an employer’s
recent hires for that class have all or nearly all had specific characteristics of education,
experience or certification, those characteristics may be taken as the basic requirements of
that classification even though they are not referenced at all in the formal class
description. But the record here does not suggest that the County’s actual hiring practices
with respect to Roads engineers brings those employees up to the stated minimum
qualifications in the class descriptions for TEA engineers.
³⁷This appears to leave one shoe still in the air: Can the County change this by
changing the classification descriptions? The answer to that question is, of course. An
employer may always adjust class descriptions (subject to the duty to bargain, in some
instances). And a union may always set out to show, in a proceeding such as this, that the
class descriptions are far of the mark when viewed against the actual hiring, assignment
and promotional practices of the employer. (E.g. “They say no degree is required, but
they said ‘degree preferred’ in most of the postings and actually hired degreed employees
85% of the time.”) In the case at hand, the record does not support the conclusion that the
class descriptions in question exhibit such errors.
³⁸The County tends to argue that that weight should be not only substantial but
dispositive; but, of course, that would essentially separate those employees from the reach of
interest arbitration all together. The County agrees that this entire bargaining unit is subject
to interest arbitration, so it would be inappropriate for us to find that our inquiry need go no
further after all than the compensation paid to similar County employees.
³⁹I quite agree with TEA’s argument that, when the legislature borrows an existing
statutory scheme pretty much whole cloth, but rewrites one important provision of that
scheme, that revision should be taken to make a substantial difference. I am not quite sure
that that issue of statutory construction is properly before this panel, however. Washington
courts have said repeatedly that clear statutory language should simply be applied on its face
and that no analysis of legislative intent is necessary or appropriate; and the language of
RCW 41.56.492(2)(c) clearly allows private sector comparators.
⁴⁰To the extent that it is proper to contemplate probable legislative intent (perhaps
a very small extent indeed), it seems reasonable to suppose that the legislature’s invitation to
consider private sector data was intentionally couched in terms that prohibit the arbitration
panel from considering only one part of total compensation. That choice may well have
reflected the legislature’s suspicion that greater salary rates in the private sector are
frequently offset by more attractive fringe benefits in the public sector.
⁴¹Moreover, TEA’S more distant proposed comparators would complicate the
discussion substantially. For example, BLS data shows a substantial difference in the mean
hourly wages for public sector professional specialty and technical employees on the west
coast. On average, compared with the Seattle metropolitan area, such employees made
almost 24% more in the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose area in 2002 and almost 19% more
in the LA-Riverside-Orange County area. (On average, they made about 4.5% less in the
Portland-Salem area.) Similarly, there are substantial differences in the cost of living in
such distant areas. It is not that such complications are inherently beyond the reach of an
interest arbitration panel. But such complications are another reason that data about distant
employers and markets seldom have the same appeal in negotiations as data about what
similar employers are paying right here in town.
⁴²The Transit Division itself uses the national CPI numbers for budgeting
purposes; and the County has used that index for bargaining with all of its many bargaining
units-and for COLA language-since the 1980s. Since that time, the usual (if not quite
universal) formula for down-years in the County’s collective bargaining agreements has been
something like “90% of the increase in the national All Cities index with a minimum of 2%
and a maximum of 6%.”
⁴³That employee took about a 25% pay cut to come to the County and-not much
surprise in the case of employees taking such substantial cuts-left within a year to take a
position commensurate with his prior pay rate.
⁴⁴It is not quite clear whether that number of applicants is limited to those who met
the minimum paper qualifications for each opening or is the raw number of all applicants.
⁴⁵County witnesses suggested that there is some evidence that part of the reason
for the repeal of the Motor Vehicles Excise Tax was the perceived leakage of funds from that
tax away from road and transit uses and into Health and Human Services and into Justice
Services.
⁴⁶Road Services expenditures, somewhat similarly-along with Public Health,
EMS, Veterans, and Mental Health Services-come out of Special Revenues, which account
for about 22% of the County’s expenditures.
⁴⁷I take notice of the recent substantial increase in gas prices throughout the
Northwest. But ridership volume is driven largely by both gas prices and employment
trends, and the record provides no reliable way to estimate the consequences of those gas
price increases alone.
⁴⁸The County has refinanced some older bond offerings that included covenants
which incorporated the 25/75 allocation.
⁴⁹For example, the South King County Bus Base, which was once planned to be
operational by 2015, will now not enter the design phase until about 2014.
⁵⁰Those estimates are based on actual overtime hours for known years and assume
no change in overtime pay eligibility from FLSA changes in the unknown year. They also
include PERS and FICA indirect personnel costs.
⁵¹The County also points out that extending the same deal to its Roads engineers
-whose contract expires at the end of the calendar year-would add an additional $1.6
million.
⁵²Bellevue’s compensation system appears to be a hybrid. A stretch of 38% is not
really enough to be a true broadband. (It is noteworthy that the difference between the
County’s 32% structure and Bellevue’s 38 % is less than the difference between the City’s
17% structure and the County’s 32%.) Moreover, it appears that a substantial number of
employees are actually at the top of their range at Bellevue (see County Exhibit 64). The
County argues that “only” about 12% of Bellevue employees are at the top of band; but 12%
is a lot of concentration at the top for a real broadband system. On this record, Bellevue may
best be treated as a traditional “step” schedule.
⁵³The Port’s pay system actually includes an additional possible 4% on top of the .
stated 40% spread.
⁵⁴TEA points to two Port of Seattle classifications-Engineering CAD Specialist
and Manager, Design Services-in which incumbents are at or above the top of the band.
But the broadband approach allows the possibility of employees occasionally being at the
very top (or bottom) of a band (and recognizes that situation as suggestive that the band
itself-i.e. the midpoint-might be too low). Certainly two employees at top of band is
vastly different from the County’s situation in which most of the employees are at or above
the top step. TEA’S argument (Post-hearing Brief at 56) does not show that the Port of
Seattle is not properly a broadband jurisdiction.
⁵⁵In fact, the choice of the class is often obvious: e.g. police officer, bus driver, etc.
The disputes in this area usually focus on the details: should one look at a five year employee
or a 20-year employee? at an Engineer or top step Firefighter? etc.
⁵⁶This will be the parties’ initial contract, after all; and it is understandable and
proper for the parties to have concentrated on the more populous and expensive engineering
classes.
⁵⁷In part, this is because not all of the comparators’ class descriptions are very
usefully drafted, which tends to drive the focus of the comparison more toward a focus on
minimum qualifications.
⁵⁸This conclusion has an important corollary. One of the many sources of
confusion in this record is the parties’ use of different names for many of the classifications
at issue. TEA consistently uses the old, Metro class titles; and the County commonly uses
some of the new, class comp titles. This inconsistency is not a product of mere orneryness,
or course: it reflects TEA’S insistence that the old classes-with their old titles-should be
maintained and the County’s insistence that many of them should be abolished in favor of the
new class comp classes and titles. That is an extremely important dispute between these
parties; but it is not at all clear whether it is properly a part of the issue before this interest
arbitration panel. In any event, the same considerations that lead me to choose an across-the-
board approach to the compensation issue-rather than a class-by-class
approach-demonstrate the inadequacy of this record as a basis of resolving this underlying
dispute over class descriptions and titles.
⁵⁹Except for Sound Transit, the Committee generally reaffirmed its prior
conclusions with respect to the engineer classifications.
⁶⁰TEA notes that it, too, would be arguing for that approach if a weighted average
came out more in its favor, and the County would probably be opposing that approach.
⁶¹On the other hand, TEA argues that if Seattle City Light is just a part of the City
of Seattle, then wherever the Committee found a “match” both at the City of Seattle and at
Seattle City Light, the numbers used for the top rate of the City of Seattle should come from
the higher paid of those two classifications.
⁶²The County also points out that Seattle City Light’s engineers are extremely
specialized, i.e. power system electrical engineers working on the City’s power grid. But the
TEA unit, too, includes specialized electrical engineers.
⁶³None of the comparables provides for longevity-based pay above the top of the
stated schedule, although Sound Transit awards performance bonuses on top of the
employees’ contracted pay rates.
⁶⁴This “paper tiger” nature of the “merit” portion of the merit pay plan is not an
altogether uncommon characteristic of public sector salary schedules with merit pay
provisions.
⁶⁵One of the parties’ tentative agreements includes a provision that “An employee
at the top of his or her schedule shall be eligible for merit increases according to the existing
practice.” On the record here, that practice makes merit pay for such employees the rule
rather than the exception. Otherwise, the result here would be quite different.

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Uniformed (41.56.465(1))	Transit (41.56.492(2))
c. ...[C]omparison of the wages, hours and conditions of employment of personnel involved in the proceedings with the wages, hours and conditions of employment of like personnel of like employers of similar size on the west coast of the United States. * * *⁸	c. Compensation package comparisons, economic indices, fiscal constraints, and similar factors determined by the arbitration panel to be pertinent to the case; and
d. The average consumer prices for goods and services, commonly known as the cost of living.
e. Changes in any of the circumstances under (a) through (d) of this subsection during the pendency of the proceedings; and
f. Such other factors ... that are normally or traditionally taken into consideration in the determination of wages, hours, and conditions of Employment. * * *	d. Such other factors ... which are normally or traditionally taken into consideration in the determination of wages, hours, and conditions of employment.

CLASS	City of Seattle	Port of Seattle	Seattle City Lighting	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?
Engineer I	28.89	32.33						31.74	30.89	25.79
Engineer II	32.19				34.22	35.70	45.11	35.16	33.61	30.49	29.54
Engineer III		41.67		40.85	39.71	38.91	49.74	41.71		35.49	32.57	40.04	35.65
Engineer IV	36.30	46.98	39.20	48.35	39.71	42.38	57.58	48.29	39.08	46.24	37.71	43.86	42.55
Engineer V	38.12	49.85	41.31	57.58	43.85		63.48	55.89	45.72	56.35	45.84	52.86
Engineer VI	41.49	55.98			48.43	54.49	69.99	61.79	54.69	56.35	53.06	63.64	57.87
Project Control Engineer I	28.89	32.33						31.74	30.89	25.79
PCE II	32.19				34.22	34.83	45.11	35.16	33.61	30.49	29.54
PCE III		41.67		40.85	39.71	37.96	49.74	41.71		35.49	32.57	40.04	35.65
PCE IV	36.30	46.98	39.2	48.35	39.71	41.35	57.58	48.39	39.08	46.24	37.71	43.86	42.55
Designer II											23.13
Designer III	30.39				28.06			27.01		23.44	25.52
Designer IV	34.25	28.41			32.57			29.35		30.49
Designer V								33.99
Construction Manager I	26.55
CM II		27.22			29.5
CM III		31.02			32.57	35.70		37.29
CM IV	36.30	41.67				38.91						40.04
CM V	38.12	46.98				41.35						43.86
CM VI	41.97	55.98		49.39		44.99		48.28
Real Property Agent I										35.79
RPA II					28.06					30.49
RPA III	31.80	41.67			34.99	35.70				30.48			34.72
RPA IV	35.85	44.26			40.82	46.12			52.08				44.68
RPA V	33.30	49.85			40.82	46.12			52.08				44.68
Environmental Planner I					28.06					30.49
EP II	31.18	36.83			32.57		42.96			32.84
EP III	34.56	44.26		41.42	37.79			39.01		35.49		41.32
Admin. Spec. I	15.98	17.13	17.78	19.44	18.72		21.81	20.83
Admin. Spec. II	20.67	19.37	19.19	21.00	21.73	22.31	24.55	22.84	23.87			23.66	20.01

Classification	#	'02 %	'03 %	'04 %
Proj. Control III	2	115.6	119.1	108.6
Designer IV	2	100.5	103.7	107.7
Const. Mgr. III	4	108.9	111.9	115.4
Const. Mgr. IV	4	115.2	119.2	123.6
Designer V	2		119.7	123.8
Engineer III	9	95.0	95.7	101.0
Engineer IV	18	105.0	114.2	116.3
Engineer V	9	121.8	128.7	134.4
Engineer VI	8	138.0	148.3	151.3

	Bellevue	Everett	Federal Way	Kent	Pierce County	Port of Seattle	Renton	Seattle	Snohomish City	Sound Transit	Tacoma	Average	King County	% Difference
Engineer I			61,568		60,258		53,893	58,906	58,053		62,941	59,270	58,219	1.8%
Engineer II	69,680	60,715	65,614	60,736	68,349	55,499	59,467	64,355	65,478		66,654	63,655	65,541	-2.9%
Engineer III	80,850	69,306	69,659	69,873	72,873	65,686	65,686	68,463	68,765	69,440	70,480	70,100	70,366	-0.4%
Engineer IV	80,850	76,232	72,271	78,972	77,397	75,252	77,210	72,571	71,120		74,194	75,607	73,798	2.5%
Engineer V	82,181	85,509	78,790	85,145	84,142	87,772	87,339	76,211	80,432		84,885	83,241	83,075	0.2%
Engineer VI	92,331	89,843		88,369		89,170		82,950	96,984	92,000		90,235	89,211	1.1%
Constr. Mgr. I						47,174	47,664	55,598	42,243		49,338	48,403	49,317	-1.9%
Constr. Mgr. II				53,604			52,584	60,757	51,334		59,238	55,503	58,219	-4.7%
Constr. Mgr. III	60,048	58,642	57,876	57,684	60,258	61,947		68,474	53,852			59,848	65,541	-8.7%
Constr. Mgr. IV	66,300	69,306	67,116		68,349	68,904	71,677	68,765		65,333		68,219	72,072	-5.3%
Designer I									42,243		42,349	42,296	44,845	-5.7%
Designer II		45,947	49,057				46,467	55,598	48,835			49,181	49,317	-0.3%
Designer III	57,158	50,648		49,728	49,899		53,893	60,757	51,334			53,345	55,515	-3.9%
Designer IV				54,888	60,258	44,304	59,467		53,851		53,102	54,312	58,219	-6.7%
Designer V	66,300							68,474	59,383		58,428	63,146	65,541	-3.7%
Designer VI					68,349			71,677	62,357			67,461	70,366	-4.1%
Transp. Planner	76,932	60,444	61,572	68,616	68,349	70,030	58,472	67,891	62,357		72,862	66,753	72,061	-7.4%
Transp. Planner IV	85,197	78,678	68,796	72,024	72,758	84,670		66,581	68,760		68,099	73,951	93,798	0.2%
Administration I	54,372				46,176	51,896	44,220	57,179	56,592		50,731	51,595	52,936	-2.5%
Admin. Spec. II	44,747		40,956	42,120	44,304	43,805	38,148	35,547	37,411		41,746	40,976	38,896	5.3%
Admin. Staff Asst.	51,734				41,974			50,045	42,243			46,499	50,482	-7.9%
Info. Syst. Prof.	69,672	63,503	66,000	70,344	72,800	70,318	60,984	60,632	56,599		66,560	65,741	67,122	-2.1%
Prop. Agent III	70,012	64,812		64,298	64,251	73,847	62,496	63,586	59,376		66,477	65,462	65,540	-0.1%
Bus. Finance Off. III	66,300	67,308	69,312	57,684	72,758	69,000	62,941					66,472	70,366	-5.5%

	City of Seattle/Seattle City Light		Port of Seattle		Sound Transit	Bellevue		King County (2003)^A	Ave.	King County	Difference
Cons. Mgr. II	C E Spec. Associate	61,963	Const. Inspect.	51,305		Const. Project Inspect	58,008	54	62,314	58,398	55,211	5.77%
CM III			Sr. Inspect	58,473		Sr. Const Project Inspect	64,056	59	70,159	64,229	64,319	-0.14%
CM IV			Sr. Inspect	58,473				63	77,141	76,568	76,157	0.54%
Dsgn. II	CE Spec Asst. II	74,027	Asst. Resident Engn.					47	52,782	52,495	44,354	18.35%
Dsgn. III	CE Spec. Associate	61,963				Engn. Tech.	55,200	52	59,527	58,863	51,586	14.11%
Dsng. IV	CE Spec Sr.	69,846	Eng. CAD	53,542				54	62,314	61,901	55,211	12.12%
Dsgn. V	CE Spec Supervisor	61,963						59	70,159	66,061	61,152	8.03%
Dsgn. VI								62			72,422
Average for Construction	Mgr. and Designer	Classifications:										8.40%
Average for all three	classification series	(12 classifications):										7.80%