Lobbying for Locality Pay

Some federal employees may have eyed their counterparts in Raleigh, N.C., covetously this year when workers there captured a 5.62 percent pay hike.

What's the Raleigh secret? The city, along with Phoenix and Buffalo, N.Y., were marked for the first time to receive special locality payments as part of their yearly raise. They were taken out of the "Rest of U.S." category for locality pay -- which this year received a 2.83 percent increase -- and were paid according to the labor market in their area.

Each year since 1994, the group of nine presidentially appointed labor leaders and salary experts who form the Federal Salary Council makes recommendations on which areas deserve consideration as separate localities and what raises in those areas should be.

Raleigh's boon wasn't blind luck. Some Raleigh-area employees contacted the Office of Personnel Management and the salary council to suggest taking a closer look at establishing the city as a separate locality, said Donald Winstead, OPM's deputy associate director for pay and performance policy.

The council responded and asked the Bureau of Labor Statistics to prepare data relating to the request. The data supported the move and led to the recommendation for the 5.62 percent increase.

What does a successful lobbying effort for locality pay entail? According to Kim Ainsworth, executive director of the Greater Boston Federal Executive Board, it takes a close eye on the Federal Register, patience, a dash of political savvy and thorough research.

Ainsworth successfully lobbied the council to include federal employees working on Cape Cod, Mass., in the Boston area locality as of January 2005.

The council usually meets just once a year, with the date and location sometimes published in the Federal Register just 15 days before the event.

Kathrene Hansen, executive director of the Greater Los Angeles Federal Executive Board, was part of a team that prepared a presentation for the group's most recent meeting to advocate splitting the Los Angeles locality into two separate areas: LA-Coastal and LA-Inland. Her team's argument was that Inland's labor market is unfairly dragging down the rest of the city's labor statistics.

Hansen said an Oct. 3 meeting announcement was published in the Federal Register on Sept. 13. Immediately, her group submitted a request to present at the meeting. They had 14 days to collect data, prepare a presentation and book a plane to Washington.

The meetings are public, and anyone who wants to speak can either contact OPM beforehand or just show up, Winstead said.

Hansen's proposal was put on hold to be considered for 2007, but it's not dead yet. Persistence, according to Ainsworth, is another pillar of a successful locality effort. Her group tried three times before succeeding to add Cape Cod to the locality area, and even when it succeeded, the pay raise had a lag time.

"The federal salary council makes decisions a full year in advance," Ainsworth said. "So if you meet with them in December 2005, the earliest you're even going to be considered is January 2007, and even that's fairly unlikely."

Ainsworth said a common error that groups make in their presentations is to focus on the cost of living in their area, not the cost of labor. No matter how expensive housing and other expenses may be, that's not what the council takes into consideration. Rather, they examine what other employees in the area make.

Getting congressional players involved may help as well, both Ainsworth and Hansen said. Ainsworth's group had representation from the offices of Massachusetts Democratic Sens. John Kerry and Edward Kennedy as well as Rep. Bill Delahunt, D-Mass.

"We had to convince them that it was a worthy cause, too," Ainsworth said. "We tried to meet with as many people as we could. [It was] really a grass-roots approach on our part."

Mostly, Ainsworth said, having as much pertinent information as possible will help convince council members in the five minutes that presenters usually are given to speak.

"You can't just go before the Federal Salary Council," Ainsworth said. "If you're going to take their time, you really have to have a thoughtful proposal."

Ainsworth said groups should take a close look at the criteria for adding or expanding localities and gather research from census data, labor market data and commuting data from places such as real estate offices, local government outlets and nonprofit organizations.

At the end of the day, Winstead said, the views of groups are considered, but facts speak loudest. Winstead points to the case of Grant County, Ind., which the council added to the Indianapolis locality grouping without ever hearing from workers there.

"We try to base judgments that we make here on criteria that could be applied across the board to every situation rather than on campaigns by groups of employees," Winstead said. "We take the views of individuals and groups who would like to see changes; we take their views certainly into account, but we try to be even-handed in the way we apply those criteria across the board."