The Federal Salary Council, a group made up of agency,
union and outside compensation experts who advise the
administration on pay matters, has rejected proposals to
create separate general schedule locality zones for
numerous cities and to make other requested changes in
how the borders are drawn.
The group, which typically meets only once a year, gets
requests from agency managers, members of Congress and
individual employees to create new locality pay zones in
order to boost salaries in an area in order to aid
recruitment and retention. Similarly, it sometimes changes
boundary lines of localities to pull in outlying areas
that are part of the commuting zone for the locality.
During the course of the year since its last meeting, the
group received requests to create new localities around some
30 cities, the largest of which include Austin, Memphis,
Norfolk, Reno, and Louisville. It also received requests
to merge the Sacramento and San Jose-San Francisco areas,
and to add certain areas to the Hartford and Denver
locality pay zones, and to split the Los Angeles and San
Jose-San Francisco areas into several parts with higher
rates to be paid in the “core” areas.
However, the council denied all of those requests, saying
the requests didn’t meet its criteria for creating or
changing localities.
