All this talk about market value pay and percentages can be confusing to anyone trying to follow Berlin officials’ discussion of how to fix the town’s big payroll problem.

That problem, apparently, is that many town employees are being paid far less than their counterparts in similar areas, and that has led to difficulties in hiring and retaining the kinds of people town government needs.

The confusing aspect of this conversation is caused by the human resources nomenclature officials and staff use as they discuss how to react to the results of a compensation study.

The term “market value salaries,” for instance, is an HR reference to how much a person would be paid, given market conditions. In plain English that means “the going rate.”

More difficult to understand is what the mayor and council mean when they say they might have to settle for increasing employee pay to the 35 percent level of market value, instead of the 50 percent they prefer.

To be clear, this would not be a 35 percent pay increase. Look at it this way: the pay study found that the going rate for a Gadget Operator I is between $35,000 a year and $75,000, depending on the market. The dead center in that range, or median pay, is $55,000 — 50 percent get more and 50 percent get less.

The mayor and council can’t afford to bump up the Gadget Operator’s pay to the median — or 50 percent —level, but feel they can raise it to where the town’s Gadget Operator makes more than 35 percent of the other gadget operators in the total pay range of between $35,000 to $75,000. For Berlin’s Gadget Operator, that would be $49,000.

As the town’s elected officials observed during this discussion, it’s a shame that the employee pay situation has sunk t0 a point where it’s too expensive to fix all at once.

But they have pledged to keep ratcheting up employees’ pay until it reaches that median level sooner rather than later. That assurance has to mean something to workers who have been paid too little for too long, and they will get something in this budgetary go-round.

Regardless of how it’s said — market value versus going rate — it’s clear that the town has to pick up its employees after letting them down for so long.