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Precinct One commissioner Rodney Ellis has officially passed his measure to significantly raise the minimum wage of all county employees. The new minimum wage for full-time employees is $20.00 an hour, but for contractors working for the county, it's $21.65 an hour.
This move will affect around 20,000 county employees, presumably even those who don't live in Harris County and are working remotely from places like Dallas and Austin, as KTRH previously reported. The wage hike takes effect on May 3rd of this year and is expected to cost around $5.4 million.
The lone Republican on Commissioners Court, Precinct Three commissioner Tom Ramsey, pointed out that the county simply doesn't have the money for this. He said, "We are in the hole. We are so far behind the schedule on our budget, we cannot afford to give out a blanket pay raise."
Ramsey went on to point out that the commissioners have already given out huge amounts of money in raises this year, saying, "It was less than 2 months ago that we gave everybody who made less than $75,000 a year a 7% increase."
One of the weirdest parts of all of this is the fact that the minimum wage of county employees will now be tied to a study out of MIT. Ramsey blasted that move as well, saying, "To have a bureaucrat who happens to go to an Ivy League school come down here and say, 'Well, I know what they should be paying people in Harris County.' This is really bad policy."
Ramsey added that this is just the latest in a long series of examples of how chaotically the Democratic Party is running Harris County.