Why Salaries are Being Raised in the City Hall: My Step Member Presents a Project

The agenda of today’s extraordinary session of the Yerevan City Council includes two questions, one of which proposes to raise the salaries of the city hall employees. It is noteworthy that the authors of the project are My Step members of the Yerevan City Council, Levon Hovhannisyan and Armen Galjyan.

While presenting the project, author Levon Hovhannisyan stated that it is proposed to revise the staffing list of the Yerevan City Hall and the administrative regions, particularly the rates of the job positions provided therein. The justification of the project mentions that the current rates of the staffing list of the Yerevan City Hall were last changed in 2011, which does not reflect inflation that has occurred in the interim, as well as the assessment given to the specialist in the form of compensation and the real picture in the overall job market.

“Due to low salaries, the Yerevan City Hall is unable to act as a competitive employer in the labor market, and in the current conditions, there is also a noticeable outflow of specialists, which negatively affects the development vision of the city of Yerevan that we have outlined. Considering the above, until now, the Yerevan City Hall has used the distribution of bonuses as a solution to the problem, which, despite its budgetary economic classification, has been essentially applied as a salary supplement tool. Moreover, the project takes into account the factor of redistributing budgetary resources of the Yerevan community, particularly as a result of the mentioned change, the salary fund of the Yerevan community's budget does not exceed the amount of the salary and bonus fund provided in the 2020 budget,” said Levon Hovhannisyan, the author of the project.

He also noted that there are two budgets established for salaries for 2021, one being the salary fund and the other being the fund for bonuses and supplements. The project proposes to reduce the bonuses fund by 20 times and transfer that amount to the main salary fund. According to the project, the salary of the community servants of the city hall is increased by 38.1%, while the salary of the employees of the administrative regions is increased by 32.46%.