Rockville’s mayor and council members won’t receive handsome raises after all.
After months of debates over a proposal to compensate the city leaders to nearly double their annual salaries, the matter was defeated Monday.
In the end, the city council voted down any raises whatsoever.
The proposal — recommended by a special compensation commission — was to increase the mayor’s annual pay from $25,000 to $45,000 over a three-year period and the council members’ annual payments from $20,000 to $40,000 over the same span.
Virginia Onley, chair of the commission, said her group believes that such substantial raises are crucial in recruiting high-quality candidates for public office, and, as such, she’s disappointed that the measures didn’t pass.
“We had hoped that they’d take our suggested changes,” she said. “The city is growing, and these jobs require putting in a lot of hours … You deserve greater pay.”
Onley said the idea of gradually increasing the payments over a three-year span was a new strategy that ultimately failed. Now the commission will reconvene in 2009 and make a new set of compensation recommendations.
Critics of the dramatic pay increases have countered that the mayor and council positions are really part-time, policy-setting positions and that higher compensation does not heavily affect the number of quality candidates for the jobs.
Jim Marrinan, who served on the council a decade ago, has told The Examiner that he was disturbed by the fact that he made less than $10,000 when on the job and that the proposed increases would quadruple that sum.
The compensation commission considers every two years what to pay city officials. In 2003, the last time the city leadership did not fully support the commission’s recommendation, the council opted to support 50-percent raises instead of the 100-percent recommended raises.
