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.
The research panel
Every row carries a research link. It opens a panel with the searches you would run to check or update that position's figures: the BLS national wage page and O*NET profile for its occupational code where one has been established, the Mississippi and Jackson-metro wage tables, the MDES state table with entry and experienced rates, current job postings near Jackson, and reported pay for the title.
Twelve positions have no occupational code yet, mostly the clerical roles and three department manager titles. Assigning one is a judgement call, so rather than guess, the panel opens with an O*NET title search and the full BLS occupation list — enough to find the right code yourself in a minute or two. Positions you add behave the same way, and the add form takes an optional SOC code if you already know it, which switches on the direct wage and profile links for that row.
There is no AI and no account behind this. The links are built from the job title and opened in a new tab with the referrer suppressed, so nothing from the worksheet is transmitted anywhere — what leaves your browser is an ordinary search you could have typed by hand.
Adding a position
Add position opens a bar where you enter a title, a department, how many posts, and the hourly rate you would pay. Use it for a post that does not exist on the roster yet — a second journeyman lineman, a safety and training coordinator, an IT or SCADA technician — or to model filling a vacancy at a rate of your choosing. If you know the market figure, enter it as an annual amount and the comparison columns will work; leave it blank and the row simply carries no benchmark.
Added posts are counted as hires rather than raises, and the cost is the full salary multiplied by the number of posts, since none of it is currently being spent. The fill buttons leave them alone — the rate you typed is a decision, not a proposal to be overwritten — and Clear does not touch them either. Take one out with the remove link on its row. They are saved and restored with the plan.
Why electric and gas rows carry a warning
Stennis built its peer group on population size, not on what CMU actually is. Of the fourteen municipalities surveyed, only five operate a municipal electric system — Clarksdale, Oxford, Starkville, Tupelo and Yazoo City. The other nine have no electric department at all; their residents are served by Entergy, Mississippi Power or a co-op. That single fact explains the thin electric section, where positions drew one to four responses, and it means the municipal mean for those rows rests on a handful of systems rather than fourteen.
Mississippi has twenty-three municipal electric utilities. Seventeen were never surveyed, and several are far closer structural matches than Biloxi or Horn Lake — New Albany Light, Gas & Water runs all three services CMU runs, and Greenwood, Philadelphia, Louisville, Columbus, Holly Springs, Kosciusko and West Point are combined-service systems in the same size band as Canton.
The gas rows are worse: every gas position came back with no responses at all, so those figures come from O*NET rather than any municipal peer. Olive Branch was in the survey and operates a municipal gas system, which makes the empty result a question worth putting to Stennis directly. The Municipal Gas Authority of Mississippi holds the membership roster that would fill this gap, and CMU's own gas manager presides over the state gas association — the benchmarking data reported as unobtainable sits inside a network CMU already leads.
Treat the flagged rows as directional. The gap they show is probably real, but the number behind it is not yet defensible against a determined question.
The private and broad-market column
The municipal column compares CMU against the fourteen Mississippi systems Stennis surveyed. That answers what a municipal utility ought to pay. It does not answer who CMU actually loses people to, which is what the private column is for. Only positions with a real comparator carry a figure; the rest are left blank rather than reusing one occupation code across unrelated jobs, which is the flaw already noted in the study itself.
Sources, by row. Department managers use the BLS all-employer Mississippi figure, which surveys private and public employers together — marked shared code because Stennis mapped the Water, Wastewater and Electric managers to one occupation, so it is directional rather than a standing benchmark. Line trades use posted Entergy Mississippi rates. Maintenance roles use the Nissan Canton production rate, which is the assembly floor rather than the higher industrial-maintenance scale. Wastewater workers use a posted Jackson contract-operator rate.
Gas Utility Worker and Groundman are crosswalked. Neither drew a single peer response, so both are mapped to the nearest Standard Occupational Classification and priced from the Mississippi all-employer table. Gas Utility Worker maps to plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters (47-2152) at a $56,690 mean; a more conservative floor is pipelayers (47-2151) at $45,480, and control and valve installers (49-9012) sit slightly higher at $58,060. Groundman maps to helpers — electricians (47-3013) at $35,520. A crosswalk is an argument about which job this really is, not a survey of the same job, so expect the mapping itself to be questioned before the number is.
The two land in opposite places. Every gas utility worker sits between 59 and 80 percent of the pipefitter figure, and the lowest-paid is below the entry-level rate for every reasonable equivalent except pipelayer. Both groundmen sit at essentially 100 percent of theirs. Gas is the department with no benchmark of any kind and the widest apparent gap; groundman is already at market.
The evidence runs both ways, and that matters. Thirteen employees sit below their private comparator and three sit above it — the Maintenance Tech at 119% of the Nissan rate, the Operations Manager at 108%, and one wastewater worker at 102%. A presentation where every figure points one direction reads as advocacy; one with some positions ahead reads as analysis. Leave the favourable rows in.
Using the private fill. To private market proposes the comparator rate for the ten position types that have one and leaves every other row untouched, so it models a narrow correction rather than a general raise. Treat the result as a recruitment argument rather than a pay proposal: private comparators explain why a position goes unfilled, municipal comparators justify what the pay level should be. BLS wage figures are base wages only and exclude employer-paid retirement and insurance, so a PERS-covered municipal job is not comparable to a private one dollar for dollar. Expect that objection the moment these numbers are shown, and raise it yourself first.
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.
