Ouray City Administrator Silas Clarke this week gave every city employee a 5 percent pay raise, a move he said was needed to boost sagging morale in workers who haven’t received a salary increase for years.

Clarke, who said he discussed the plan with city councilors individually, unveiled it to the public for the first time during Monday’s City Council meeting. The pay raises took effect April 3.

The salary increases affect 22 full-time employees and 29-part-time employees and will cost the city about $96,000, an amount Clarke said accounts for less than 1 percent of the city’s annual budget. He said he is the only employee not receiving a raise.

In an interview, Clarke said he realizes he may take some heat for his decision. But he said he felt it was important to reward current employees for their hard work and perseverance through the pandemic, withstanding constant turnover within the city administrator job the last few years and covering for multiple positions elsewhere in the city that haven’t been filled for months. He hopes, in turn, that employees will back him.

“When I got here, there were very large morale issues with staff,” said Clarke, who moved from Nebraska to become the city administrator at the beginning of December.

He said city employees haven’t received merit-based pay increases in six years, receiving only cost of living adjustments during that time. He said the city conducted a pay rate survey in 2016 comparing employee salaries with those in similarly sized communities, and he said almost all employees are still paid at the lowest level on those now 6-year-old survey scales.

Clarke also said the city hasn’t conducted employee evaluations or established performance measures for several years.

“Organizationally, yes, that is alarming. But coming into Ouray, you haven’t had a consistent city administrator since the last time evaluations were completed,” he said.

The city hasn’t had a full-time city administrator for more than a year since Patrick Rondinelli resigned in 2017.

Clarke said he has told staff he doesn’t intend to provide across-the-board raises in the future, shifting instead to merit-based raises built on an employee evaluation system and performance measurements he plans to implement before the end of the year.

In other business from Monday’s meeting, councilors:

• Unanimously approved an expansion agreement that will allow the creation of a second climbing route within the Ouray Via Ferrata.

The second route will be similar in length to the nearly milelong first route but be more technically difficult than the first. It will start close to the first route and head downstream.

Mark Iuppenlatz, a board member with the Friends of the Ouray Via Ferrata, the nonprofit organization that installed and operates the via ferrata, said operators will also add an early exit on the first route.

Organizers had planned to build a second route a few years down the road. But the popularity of the via ferrata, which opened last summer and welcomed 10,000 users — nearly double what was expected — moved up that timeline.

“We’re already getting a lot of calls and people scheduling trips specifically to come here to do this,” Iuppenlatz said.

• Unanimously approved a $2,500 donation to a newly formed nonprofit, Ouray Creative, whose mission is to promote the sale and purchase of locally made goods. The money will come from lodging tax funds, pending approval from the city’s auditor.

Councilors also approved a huckstering permit for the nonprofit to host a makers’ market featuring vendor sales and live music on May 29.

• Unanimously approved the creation of a Main Street sidewalk replacement program in which the city will cover 25 percent of the cost of replacing broken sections of the sidewalk.

The program creates an application and permit form which property owners will fill out and submit, along with a professional quote for the total replacement price.

Replacement work will be performed between now and May 28 and between Sept. 7 and Oct. 31. The city will allocate up to $20,000 from lodging tax funds in this year’s budget to cover the city’s portion of the costs.

• Unanimously approved an agreement with Short-Elliott-Hendrickson Inc. of St. Paul, Minnesota, to provide planning services while the city waits for its new community development coordinator to start her job at the beginning of May. The contract calls for the company to be paid no more than $24,200, though Clarke said he expects the amount to be far less than that.