City Clerk Shawna Freels would not definitively say if she would
accept the $4,700 raise the city council voted to award her, but
she and union officials said the raise would be in line with what
other city employees recently received.
City Clerk Shawna Freels would not definitively say if she would accept the $4,700 raise the city council voted to award her, but she and union officials said the raise would be in line with what other city employees recently received.
Behind closed doors, the council voted 4-3 to approve a $4,700 raise for Freels, who earns $94,906, according to city figures and council members who spoke on condition of anonymity because a public vote is still pending. The council also voted 6-1 to approve a nearly $10,000 raise for City Administrator Tom Haglund, who earns $199,000. Haglund is on vacation until the end of the month, according to his staff, and could not be reached.
Freels was on vacation herself when the Dispatch reported the closed session vote and was surprised to hear the news in the paper, she said.
“I don’t know that I’m being offered a 5 percent increase,” Freels said. “I don’t have the facts. It’s more of hearsay at this point.”
The council, which has approved more than $11 million in general fund cuts over the last year, including 48 full-time layoffs in January, froze annual merit raises for everyone in March. A few months later, the body approved contracts with the city’s five bargaining units – which do not include Haglund or Freels because they are Gilroy’s only two council-appointed employees – to save $3.1 million through furloughs and raise postponements. While those agreements restored merit raises for those represented employees set to receive raises between March and June, they froze all raises for every employee, except Freels and Haglund, from July 1 through June 2010.
Freels approached the council in March, reminding them of her annual evaluation which should have taken place in January, she said.
“I’m a Generation X-er. I gotta know how I’m doing,” Freels joked. Though she spoke with the council at the Aug. 3 meeting, no appraisal of her work was given, she said.
“After that closed session, I don’t know what took place,” she said.
She expects to know more in September after the council votes formally on the raises.
Union officials agreed that the raises offered to Haglund and Freels are in line with what other city workers received.
“They are getting what every other person in the city is getting,” Fire Local 2805 Spokesperson Jim Buessing said. However, Buessing acknowledged that the unions had to bargain to restore their merit increases. “We’re getting what we had to meet and confer over. I didn’t see the council making a big fuss about (Freels’ and Haglund’s) raises, but they did over every other employee.”
With morale already low at city hall, Buessing said the “ease or unease” with which some staff received raises “may be upsetting to others.”
“They were made whole just like the rest of us,” said Tina Acree, business agent for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 101 – Gilroy’s largest union. “They were treated just like one of my members were. They earned that money.”
