Kansas University announced Tuesday that it would increase salaries for 185 employees.

The staff members affected are mostly technicians, custodial supervisors and administrative assistants.

KU took the steps after reviewing a state civil service salary report, said Ola Faucher, KU director of human resources and equal opportunity. The report detailed employees with salaries below similar positions in the private sector and throughout the state system.

Employees on the KU Lawrence campus are not part of the civil service system. If KU were part of the system, about 1,500 support staff would qualify, Faucher said.

While state civil service employees in the report received across-the-board salary increases, KU decided it lacked the available funds to make similar moves, she said.

Instead, KU officials chose to give increases only to employees on the bottom of the pay scale.

Faucher said that more than $100,000 would be spent on the raises, and the average raise would be about 5 percent.

She said that these raises would come on top of merit raises instituted at the beginning of this fiscal year, but she said most of the positions affected would be newer hires to the university.

With university budgets already tight, and more cuts looming, Faucher said the university spent what it could to remain competitive in the job market.

“We don’t want our recruiting ability to lag behind state employers,” she said.

All other Kansas Board of Regents universities are on the state’s civil service system, along with the KU Medical Center staff, Faucher said.

The new salaries will go into effect Dec. 14.

An additional 200 KU employees would have qualified for the raises, but they belong to Local 1290 labor union, and separate salary negotiations with the union are ongoing, Faucher said.