By Jim Cline and Kate Kremer
This is part 6 of our continued series on Washington public safety employee wages. In this issue we report on wage rankings for 911 dispatchers and police records clerks.
In this article will provide you some discussion of the wage rankings but for the full rankings, you’ll need to explore our Premium Website . If you’re not currently a Premium Website subscriber you can review our services Cline and Casillas Premium Information Services and contact Karla Rava at Cline and Casillas and she’ll explain how you can become one. For current premium subscribers below are links to some of the additional available Dispatcher and Records Clerk Wage Rank reports:
Dispatcher 5 Year No Degree 2016 Ranking
Dispatcher 25 Year BA 2016 Ranking
Records Clerks 5 Year No Degree 2016 Ranking
Records Clerk 25 Year BA 2016 Ranking
The Cline and Casillas Dispatcher survey includes 59 cities, counties and agencies. Seattle tops the 5 Year list and is 4th at the 25 Year BA. Spokane City Dispatchers(unlike their police officers) rank high, coming in 2nd place at 5 year and 3rd at 25 year BA. Valley Com, which in prior years was below South Sound (formerly LESA), is now ranked 3rd at 5 year no degree and 2nd at the 25 year BA level. Port of Seattle is 4th at the 5 year no degree wage but jumps to top position for the 25 year BA wage. NORCOM continues as a major player in the wage ranking coming in 5th at 5 year no degree and 6th at 25 year BA. Zillah dispatchers continue to bottom out the list at $3186 per month with the 59th ranked dispatcher wage, almost $250 behind second to last Ferry County at 25 Year BA.
The top 10 dispatcher wages at the 5 year level are listed below:
The Records Clerk data continues to reveal some unusual rankings. Medina is not on the high end of population and yet it has risen from its already high ranking to be the highest records clerk wage on our lists. For the 25 year BA wage Renton, historically ranked 1st , is now ranked 2nd. Renton slipped to be ranked 7th at the 5 year no degree level. Other smaller cities that continue to rank high on these Records Clerks lists are Fife and Monroe. In addition to Renton, Mercer Island, Everett, Lake Forest Park, Issaquah and Tukwila are the larger cities that made the top 10 in our ranking at the 25 year BA level.
At the 25 year BA wage Seattle records clerks actually are ranked a surprising 30th place, just below Washougal, out of the 133 records clerk positions surveyed. And King County continues as in past years to rank lower than what might be predicted at 38th, between Montesano and Bonney Lake. Spokane County records clerks, surprisingly, are ranked at 132nd.
Cities with the top 10 ranked 5 year no degree wages are listed in the table below:
In some future articles in this series, we’ll delve into factors which appear to contribute to rankings including geographic location, population and assessed valuation. In those articles we reveal how geography, size and tax base are highly predictive of wage rankings but in the case of Seattle and King County records clerks, for example, that does not always prove to be the sole explanation. In the next article in this series, we’ll turn to a discussion about the extent to which Population is associated with wage rankings.
