Sanger weighs job benchmarks

City manager’s plan would link raises to evaluations; city would control funding

SANGER — When City Manager Mike Brice was a firefighter in the small Oklahoma town of Nichols Hills, employees of the police and fire departments went for four years without raises in the mid-1980s.

The union had negotiated merit pay raises in steps, but after the oil bust, the city couldn’t afford to pay them.

“It was a knuckle-wrenching time,” Brice said, adding that if the city and union had found some common ground another way, public safety employees might have received raises as soon as that second year.

To keep that from happening in Sanger, Brice proposed the City Council adopt an uncommon tool for the public sector, but often used in the private sector — benchmarks.

With a benchmark system, a city employee’s merit raise is based primarily on the individual annual evaluation. But funding all the raises remains with the City Council.

“That way, you control it,” Brice told the council in Monday night’s workshop session. “It could be 4 percent one year … or zero the next, if you found you couldn’t afford it.”

Police: Robbery victim had drugs

Denton police took the victim of a home-invasion robbery to jail Sunday after finding drugs and paraphernalia in plain sight in his apartment, according to a report.

Officers responded shortly after midnight to the 700 block of North Locust Street to a small loft apartment over a garage. An officer noted that he smelled marijuana as he walked toward the apartment and the smell was stronger inside the apartment. The victim acted “high,” according to the report.

A man with a heavily bruised face said that some men kicked in the door and beat him until he told them where he was hiding cash. They left with about $1,000, he said.

The officer noted that the door showed signs of being kicked in several times. The victim said the same men robbed him a few weeks ago. Another man who lived in the apartment said the same men actually had broken in and robbed them three times.

The officer saw drugs and paraphernalia in the apartment and charged the victim with possession of a controlled substance.

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