A key D.C. Council member Wednesday slammed a proposed increase in upper-echelon executive pay as “close to ridiculous” and “over the top,” arguing that high-level government employees should work for the passion of service, not private sector-like salaries.
Mayor Adrian Fenty’s proposal to pay certain upper-echelon employees up to $279,900 a year is “unjustifiable,” Council Member Carol Schwartz, chair of the government operations committee, said during a hearing before her panel. Government work is for “serving the public and not for getting rich,” she said.
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“We’ve got this whole new crop [of employees] coming in, and it seems to be more about the money than the passion, and that worries me,” Schwartz said.
The legislation would create two additional salary levels within the executive pay schedule ranging from $148,000 to $279,900. City Administrator Dan Tangherlini, who testified before Schwartz’s committee, said the existing salary schedules “do not lend themselves to the flexibility and adaptability that is necessary when setting and negotiating executive pay.”
“The District needs the ability to offer the type of salaries that will allow high-level executives to live and work in the District and that will allow us to be able to recruit nationally,” Tangherlini said.
The higher salaries are competitive among other municipalities, Tangherlini said, and would apply only to a handful of positions. They are not delivered “on a whim,” he said, and expanding their use would require a mayoral order and “justification.”
The council approved an emergency version of the bill in July to lock in the salaries of six top officials: Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi at $279,000, schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee at $275,000, School Facilities Chief Allen Lew at $275,000, Police Chief Cathy Lanier at $191,531, Fire Chief Dennis Rubin at $176,550, and a yet-to-be-recruited chief medical examiner.
The permanent measure, Schwartz argued, would provide Fenty a “carte blanche blank check, and I’m not going to write it.”
Bonuses out of control
During Wednesday’s government operations committee hearing, City Administrator Dan Tangherlini said the city’s annual performance bonus program has “gone too far” and:
» ordered agency heads to limit performance bonuses
» directed agencies to develop bonus plans
» asked agency directors to consider raises rather than bonuses
