Item 25: COLAs for Council Appointees?
City Council has four appointees, four people who answer directly to Council. These are the City Lawyer, the City Manager, the City Clerk, and one more that I’m not sure about. Maybe the municipal judge?
When city employees all get Cost of Living Adjustments, these four don’t. Mayor Hughson proposes to change that.
I am not particularly invested in this issue either way. Salaries should be egalitarian, and COLAs should be automatic. The question is: are these four salaries so outsized that we shouldn’t automatically give them COLAs?
Commissioner Baker points out that COLAs on a $200K salary are way more than most San Marcos residents would get in COLA adjustments. One phrase that Max frequently uses is: “Budgets are moral documents,” which I think is very insightful. Budgets are statements of priorities and goals, judgments made by people. His point is that the range of salaries is immoral, and it’s immoral that a 2% COLA adjustment on $200K is $2k, but a 2% COLA adjustment on $50k is only $500.
I can sharpen Max’s argument: inflation does not impact all people equally. Homeowners are locked into a monthly payment that was established whenever they bought their home, so they get a 30 year pass on housing inflation. Whereas renters are drastically more affected, immediately and repeatedly.
(If you really want to up-end conventional wisdom, consider this point: inflation is great for people with debt. If you’ve got large student debt or a large mortgage, the money you owe gets eaten up as the dollar loses value. This is great!
To state the obvious, inflation sucks because prices go up and wages don’t. One of our biggest moral failings as a society was not to automatically peg the minimum wage to inflation, when it was first established. If jobs always pegged wages to inflation, then the workers would have some protection against the worst parts of inflation.)
Anyway: should these four individuals receive COLA adjustments whenever the rest of the city does? It matters a lot what the City Clerk makes, vs the City Manager or City Lawyer. In the end they decide to wait on the issue until after they get some numbers.
…
Should the performance evaluations of those same four appointees be open to the public? Didn’t we discuss this semi-recently? We did.
I hadn’t agreed with the outcome then, to publish every detail of performance evaluations. This week they changed their mind, and will only publish a summary of evaluations, written by a 3rd party consultant. So now I do approve of their decision. Great! (Why exactly did Mayor Hughson put it back on the agenda? How did councilmembers Gonzalez and Garza come to change their mind? I agree with the outcome, so I’m not too worried, but clearly conversations occurred behind the scenes. Which is part of how the sausage is made.)
The San Marxist 