Members of the Missouri House will vote this week on a bid to boost pay for child abuse investigators — something that both Republicans and Democrats say the state must do to better recruit and train people who look into reports of abuse and neglect.
But whether a significant pay boost will happen is unclear, especially since Gov. Mike Parson generally supports state employee salary increases that are uniform across the board.
Missouri’s Children’s Division is responsible for investigating claims of child abuse or neglect that are reported to the state hotline. But the agency’s St. Louis office has had major trouble retaining the employees who do that, with a starting salary of around $42,000 a year and caseloads that are much larger than federal standards suggest.
The employee turnover is blamed for a huge backlog of cases that remain open, something that’s alarmed lawmakers and child welfare policy advocates.
As of now, an early draft of the budget plans to give Children’s Division employees a 3.2% raise — which Parson touted in his January State of the State speech. And while staffing at the St. Louis branch of the Children’s Division office is improving, state Rep. Peter Merideth says his colleagues should boost investigator salaries by more than the standard raise of 3.2%.
“What I have found consistently is that the hardest thing to get [Republicans] to do as a solution to problems we all agree on is to pay people more money,” said Meredith, D-St. Louis. “It is really hard to get Republicans to agree that a job that is currently essentially a low-wage job needs to be paid for. … Because over and over again, they end up saying, ‘Well, we shouldn't be doing raises just for one group and not for the others.’
“Now, frequently they will make an exception for that if it comes to the police or highway patrol,” he added. “But when it comes to people that take care of our kids, whether it's teachers or social workers, or mental health workers, they just won't do it.”
Merideth said his Democratic colleagues will put forward an amendment during debate over the budget to raise the pay for investigators. One possibility, Meredith said, is an amendment allowing the Children’s Division to boost salaries by more than 3.2% where the agency has significant backlogs.
Unlike with other House bills, Meredith noted that the GOP-controlled chamber can’t cut off debate when budget bills come up to the floor — and said there will be a vote on raising child investigator pay.
While Democrats are in the superminority in the Missouri House, they often play a fairly impactful role in crafting the budget — especially when there’s buy-in from GOP budget leaders in either chamber.
Missouri House Budget Committee Chairman Cody Smith said Friday he is open to a “special pay plan for Children’s Division employees that is beyond the 3.2%,” adding that “without seeing the details of [the House Democratic] proposal, I can’t say if I would be willing to support it.”
“I'm not sure exactly what the magic number is. But if we can't hire anyone to do those jobs within the St. Louis market, we can start by paying more and surmise that we are not paying enough,” Smith said earlier this month. “And so that is a particular difficult job to do, even if it paid six figures to investigate child abuse. So $44,000 probably isn't enough to attract new people to the workforce, do those jobs.”
Although salaries for Children Division investigators are higher than it’s been in the past, top officials with the Department of Social Services, Missouri lawmakers and former investigators have said the pay scale isn’t competitive enough to keep regional offices fully staffed.
Illinois’ starting salary for child abuse investigators is $72,000 a year. And hospitals, schools and government contractors also pay more — and provide a more reasonable workload.
“As far as how much we're paying the state workforce at large, I just think we need to be much more thoughtful and deliberate about which of these jobs are most difficult to fill,” Smith said. “And what do we need to do to pay those people enough to attract them to these difficult state government jobs and keep them there?”
Uniform or case by case?
Still, Smith said that Parson previously vetoed appropriations that provided more money to the Children’s Division than he preferred. He also noted that the governor typically prefers across-the-board pay increases, as opposed to honing on larger raises for specific types of jobs.
“And so that's something that we've gone back and forth a little bit with Gov. Parson,” Smith said. “I think he prefers, generally speaking, a universal pay plan where everyone gets the same amount. And you've seen the General Assembly try to be a little more nuanced there and try to focus more attention on greater areas of need.”
During an interview in January, Parson said that pay increases need to be sustainable — especially in bad budgetary times.
“The mentality of state government is one year at a time, I think we all know that it's been around here,” Parson said. “But when you start doing pay raises, and you start doing increases, whether it's mental health, education, roads, whatever it is, you’ve got to be able to maintain it too.”
Smith said since the Children’s Division isn’t a massive agency within state government, it’s possible to do a special pay plan without causing long-term problems.
“There are 55,000 employees that work for the State of Missouri. I believe the folks that work in the Children’s Division, and specifically the ones that have the most challenging jobs, are not a huge number of that 55,000,” he said.
Meredith said one issue is that state agencies are often reluctant to stray from the governor’s desires when it comes to pay increases for state workers.
“We could really use a specific request from the department so that it's not a plan that legislators are just making up a number and saying ‘go forth,’” Meredith said. “We want to know what they actually think they could do. And it's been frustrating with a lot of the departments in that they don't want to take a position aggressively different from what the governor recommends.”
While the House will likely pass its version of the budget this week, the measure will still need to pass the Senate. And the budget will almost certainly change between when the House passes it and when a conference committee sends an agreement to Parson’s desk.
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