After embarrassingly strong public pressure, the City Council
voted to cut its pay 10 percent.
After embarrassingly strong public pressure, the City Council voted to cut its pay 10 percent.
It’s not only a token cut, it comes after all the budget cuts for city employees and programs. Thus, the token vote and cut – which will save the city about $8,000 annually – only really pours salt in an already sore leadership wound.
Councilman Perry Woodward’s reasonable plan to drop health benefits for elected officials, the only part-time city employees who receive health and retirement benefits, would have saved in the neighborhood of $64,000 a year and removed an incentive to run for local office that should not exist.
The Council took a step in the right direction, opting to reconsider cuts, after Councilman Woodward’s initial motion made in June to cut the health benefits went down in flames without one iota of discussion for lack of a second. It’s all quiet when the cuts being made hit home.
Unfortunately, the Council has taken what they consider to be a defensible position – “We took the same percentage cuts as everyone else.”
That’s after everyone else, of course, and after public pressure applied in the wake of all the cuts at City Hall.
The leadership generated from this latest move is not only weak, it’s disingenuous. The message is obvious to the public and to employees of the city: “We know we have to do something, but we think we deserve what we’re getting, so we’ll take a small cut in pay and talk about it as a percentage – that same percentage cut that many employees received.”
It’s not good enough. And it’s too bad.
Said Woodward: “The overall cost needs to come down by at least 15 percent in order for us to demonstrate the leadership we need to demonstrate.”
Even that would not have been enough. Perhaps the Council can muster the courage to discuss and end health benefits for future Council members. Of course, that might change re-election thoughts.
