The Austin Community College board of trustees may give employees a 3 percent salary increase when it votes on next fiscal year's budget July 10.

The increase would cost ACC about $5 million and would put the community college district in the lead for competitive salaries locally, according to Neil Vickers, ACC's executive vice president of finance and administration.

Vickers said many other organizations in the government and civic sector—including other neighboring community colleges and local governments—will likely keep their salary increases around 2 percent.

"Clearly there’s data to do at least [a] 2 percent [salary increase]," he said. "The question becomes, 'How much more do you do?'"



ACC trustee Julie Ann Nitsch asked whether it would be possible to give a 5 percent increase—last year, the board also voted on a 3 percent increase.

"I think it's wonderful that we’re doing as well as we are, but I also think that we could do better," she said, adding the cost of living and faculty members' student debt has risen.



"We’d need to go find money elsewhere in the budget," Vickers said, pointing to the balanced budget achieved with the proposed 3 percent raise.

In addition to the proposed 3 percent across-the-board employee raises, ACC will also adjust full-time faculty, adjunct faculty and classified, professional-technical and administrative employees based on faculty compensation market surveys.

The 3 percent recommended salary raise also includes increasing the living wage by 5.4 percent to $15 an hour, or $31,200 annually. This would affect 118 employees and would cost the community college district $78,128. Living-wage employees are classified as salaried full-time employees, according to ACC's compensation information manual.

Health care premiums for employees are also scheduled to increase by less than 1 percent, according to Vickers.