A week after passing legislation to award Akron’s police union the largest wage increase in decades and the highest wages in department history, Akron City Council approved raises for every non-unionized employee in the city, including City Council members, the mayor and his cabinet.
That means job cuts, service cuts, or tax and fee increases could be coming next year.
“These are adding a substantial amount of money to the city’s labor costs,” said Steve Fricker, the city’s finance director, in his October presentation to City Council about the wage increase legislation. “I’ve talked about this – we are going to have to look at what our staffing levels are and various aspects of our budget for 2026 in order to accommodate these higher amounts.”
The City Council vote this week approved a 3% raise, retroactive to the beginning of the year, to non-unionized unclassified employees, and retroactive 3.5% increases to non-unionized classified employees. All non-unionized city employees will see another 2.5% raise in 2026.
The considerable pay bumps to Akron police officers (the new union contract approved last week includes a 5% increase for 2025, 4.5% raises in both 2026 and 2027 and an immediate $4,000 bonus for every officer), expected similar raises and bonuses for unionized Akron firefighters who are currently negotiating a new contract, and many other city employees puts the city in precarious financial standing in the months before the 2026 budget process.
With a decrease in income tax collection — Mayor Shammas Malik told Signal Akron income tax revenue is down 2% — and the significant loss of federal and state grants, the money to fund the wage increase needs to be found somewhere that has not yet been identified by the city.
The mayor’s office initially lumped the police union wage increases and the slightly smaller non-union wage increases in the same legislation last month but separated the two requests when some City Council members indicated they wanted raises for the non-union employees to be higher than what the mayor’s office originally proposed.
The original legislation proposed retroactive 3% raises for non-union employees and 2.25% raises for 2026. The now-passed legislation kept the 2025 figure the same for “unclassified” employees and raised it to 3.5% for classified employees. It also bumped up next year’s raises to 2.5% for both.
Balancing wages, Akron’s finances and service levels
Malik told Signal Akron the wage increases and whatever moves are necessary to fund it — cuts or new revenue sources — are an attempt to balance “three pillars.”
“We’re trying to make sure people are compensated well, we want to make sure we have financial reserves for the city, and we want to make sure we’re able to have the staffing and city services that work for the city,” Malik said. The balancing act, he said, is made even more difficult with the expiration of the federal COVID-era American Rescue Plan Act grant funding and a federal grant that funded the salaries of 75 police officers.
Malik said that even if police and the anticipated firefighter union wages and bonuses, which are reciprocal to the police wages and bonuses, had come in lower, Akron, like any healthy city, would still need to comb through each of its departments to identify what can be on the chopping block in the city’s next budget proposal.
“We’ve been doing that work, really, since the summer,” Malik said. His office has been working with each department director, including the police and fire departments, to find potential cuts to services, personnel and contracts needed to hit the figure the city wants to propose in the upcoming budget.
He said the city “isn’t talking about immediate layoffs or anything like that” and is reviewing the current job openings — he said 50 to 100 jobs are typically vacant at any given time — to see which ones are the least necessary to fill. The city is also “looking at places where there’s more revenue that can be gathered.”
“I see a lot of that coming to a head in the 2026 operating budget, really working with council to figure out what that picture is,” he said. “Because we can get through a year, we can get through two years, but we can’t operate indefinitely like this at the current staffing levels with these wage increases and the core services and maintain our fiscal reserves.”