HomeMy WebLinkAbout12/7/2021 Item 6b, Otto
Delgado, Adriana
From:Garrett Otto <garrettotto@gmail.com>
Sent:Monday,
To:E-mail Council Website
Subject:Item 6b Council Compensation Committee
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Dear Mayor and Council,
I would like to share some background as a previous committee member on the CCC two years ago. I hope staff will
share a little more information in their staff report on the type of research that was done to develop our
recommendation. Here is a brief summary of what we discussed and considered.
The committee felt it was important to define the purpose and objectives in our recommendation. We agreed on the
following purpose and objectives:
Purpose
Purpose is to build an effective City Council that is inclusive of all candidates that wish to participate.
Objectives
Item 1 - Determine if we are currently compensating Council Members and Advisory Body members appropriately.
Workload analysis ( job description in charter)
Start by sending out what we have information we already have
Comparison cities
Benefits driven changes, typical retirement scenario
Item 2 - Determine if compensation is a factor in achieving inclusivity?
Item 3 - Determine if there is a fiscally responsible way to make adjustments to
compensation to achieve the goal.
Ultimately we agreed that salary/compensation was a factor in achieving inclusivity and wanted to make a
recommendation to increase salaries for the Council. Our community has a high expectation of our mayor and city
council members which requires a large time and energy commitment. Based on a survey of weekly hour obligations, we
saw that the time commitment resembles that of a part time job which would likely reduce hours at their places of
employment. At the minimum we decided that council should be compensated to help offset those burdens to hopefully
ensure that another portion of our population could decide to run.
We decided to recommend a salary increase based on median household income and number or hours the mayor and
council members typically spent addressing city business. Unfortunately SLO median income is artificially low. SLO had
the second lowest median income in our comparison cities. This was likely due to a large student and retired population.
We used the median income as our baseline for our recommendation mostly because we didn't have any other readily
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available alternative without having staff spend more time and effort. We felt that this was a good start and "significant"
increase, but recognized it was not anywhere close to what is necessary to be more inclusive. Most of us on the
committee saw this as a first step in salary increase with hopes that we will take more meaningful steps in the future
too.
We did recognize that money is not the only limiting factor, but does play a large role. There are plenty of other factors
that would affect someone's ability to run for office. However nationally we did notice low compensation and treating
the role of mayor and council as a "volunteer" position lead to predominantly older, retired, white males serving in
those positions. Luckily for SLO we have broken away from that mold, but there are still community members that are
not represented on our council that we need to think about.
As a committee we spent the majority of our time discussing the council's compensation. We did recognise that there is
a large time commitment to serve on the planning commission, but did not make any recommendations for that fee to
be adjusted. The per meeting pay is token and would barely cover the cost of a babysitter for a parent to participate in
the meeting. Ultimately it would be nice to compensate the planning commissioners more to help encourage others to
participate in that important role too.
Speaking only for myself, I would like to see the basis for council salaries adjusted to some other "livable wage" metrix.
However, considering we made a "significant" increase recently, it may be best to wait a couple more years before
forming a CCC to weigh that idea. I do think that it is warranted to increase the salaries based on CPI this cycle.
Thank you,
Garrett Otto
San Luis Obispo
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