Using this
Type a proposed hourly rate in the blue column for anyone you want to move, or use a fill button to propose rates for everyone shown. Fill buttons only affect the rows currently visible, so you can filter to one department and plan it on its own. The summary bar totals the whole plan regardless of what is filtered.
Burden is the employer cost carried on top of base wages: payroll taxes plus the employer share of retirement. A raise costs CMU the wage increase plus that percentage again. It defaults to 28% as a placeholder — confirm the current PERS employer contribution rate and applicable payroll tax rates with the Finance Department Manager before relying on the loaded figure.
What has been removed, and what has not
Employee names, hire dates and exact length of service are gone. Service is shown as a band, and where a position has more than one holder the rows are numbered from a shuffled order, so the number is not pay order, hire order or roster order.
This is not anonymous. A position held by one person — the General Manager, the Assistant General Manager, the Electric Department Manager, each department head — is identifiable by title alone to anyone who knows the organisation. That is unavoidable in a utility of this size, and it is no more disclosure than an org chart plus a public salary request already provides. What this copy prevents is a searchable list tying named individuals to their pay.
Every figure, gap and cost matches the confidential copy exactly. Coarsening the service bands does not change any calculation; the one-year eligibility rule still works from the underlying date.
Raising some people and not others
Tick the box beside anyone you want to treat separately and an orange bar appears with its own controls. Apply _% to selected raises only those people; the two market buttons beside it push only those people to the 25th percentile or the mean. The row of buttons at the top of the page still acts on everyone currently shown, so the two scopes never get confused — the top row says "all shown", the orange bar counts exactly who it will touch.
To do a whole group, filter to a department first and then use the box in the table heading to select everyone shown. A selection survives changing the filter, so you can build one across departments: pick the electric crew, switch to Finance, add two more, then apply a single percentage to all of them.
Fills layer rather than reset. If you give the electric crew 8% and then push the under-market ones to the mean, the 8% stays on anyone the market fill skipped. Clear proposals on the orange bar wipes just the selected rows; Clear at the top wipes everything shown.
Who qualifies
With the one-year service rule switched on, only employees hired at least twelve months ago can be given a proposed rate. Nine people are currently inside their first year; their rows are greyed and show the month they become eligible. The fill buttons skip them, so a scenario never quietly includes someone who does not qualify. Qualified only hides them from view entirely.
Switch the rule off if the Board wants to consider a shorter threshold or make an exception — the rule is a policy choice, not a fact about the data, and the summary bar relabels itself so you can see which basis a figure was built on.
Two of those nine are in the electric department: an apprentice lineman hired in July 2026 and a groundman hired in August 2026. A scenario built under the one-year rule will not raise them, which is worth knowing given that the apprentice rates are the retention problem.
What the market columns mean
Market rates come from the Stennis Institute survey of fourteen Mississippi municipal systems, or the Mississippi O*NET figure where the survey drew no comparable responses. Rates marked thin rest on one or two peer responses and are too weak to plan against. Nine positions have no comparable at all, including every Gas department role — the fill buttons skip them, and you would need to set those by hand.
Annual figures assume 2,080 hours. That understates the line crew and dispatch, whose callout and storm hours run well above a 40-hour week, and it overstates the five part-time employees. A base rate increase also raises the overtime rate for non-exempt employees, which this worksheet does not model.
The vacancy
The Journeyman Lineman position has no incumbent. It carries a proposed rate so you can include the cost of filling it in a plan, but it is a new hire rather than a raise, and the cost column treats it as such.
