KANAWHA COUNTY, W.Va. –Employees in Kanawha County will soon be receiving a pay raise.

The County Commission, during its recent meeting, approved a 6% pay raise for employees.

Commission President Ben Salango said employees hadn’t recieved a pay raise since 2022.

He said employees deserve it.

“I certainly think our employees deserve it, we have some hardworking employees, this is not a 9 to 5 job,” Salango said. “We have people working weekends, we have people working nights, it is very frequent that I receive text messages at two, three a.m. Saturdays, Sundays, holidays, this is something that our employees are on the clock fulltime.”

He said they also considered other options, including one where a raise would be contingent on any budget surplus the county had.

Commissioner Lance Wheeler said the reason it took so long was because they wanted to ensure they did this in a fiscally responsible way.

“We wanted to make sure that we put the county in a good fiscal position that we would be able to consider giving that well deserved raise to our county employees and I think that we’ve been able to do that, from the hard work from this commission, with commissioner Salango, myself, and even commissioner Tennant,” he said.

He explained they had recent jail bill increases and the PEIA increases.

They also approved an additional 2% pay raise for county deputies, bringing their total increase to 8%.

Salango said the Kanawha County Sheriff’s Department is facing challenges with deputy retention.

He said this will be worth it in the long run.

“If you think about the amount of money we spend training new deputies, it is certainty worth paying them more now than spending tens of thousands of dollars on training incentives and bonuses trying to get them in, only to have them leave 30, 60 days after we hired them,” Salango said.

He expressed hope that they will have the opportunity to provide additional raises in the coming years.

“I want to make sure that we’re not loosing people for financial reasons, I don’t want any of our neighboring counties to steal our people, and so when you got good people and you want to keep them, you’ve got to pay them right,” he said.

These go into effect on September 16, with employees seeing the raise reflected in their paycheck at the end of the month.