Columbus City Council members granted themselves a huge pay raise recently, increasing each member’s pay from $8,301 to $15,079. That seems like good work if you can get it.
Much as we all would love to get an 82 percent raise, it just doesn’t tend to happen in the real world. City Council had the right to do this for themselves, but that doesn’t make it right. Especially after they made our city workers wait years for raises designed to put them on par with other Indiana cities.
The council did its homework a few years back, studying the compensation of city employees in Hoosier locales comparable to Columbus. The study found city workers and council members here were paid less on average than they were elsewhere.
There are all sorts of good reasons to make sure our city workers and council members are being compensated fairly. The council was wise to take steps to ensure that city workers’ salaries align with those of public servants in similar Hoosier cities.
So the council in recent years used the salary study findings to increase the wages of Columbus city employees.
Incrementally.
That’s not at all what they did for themselves when they voted to not quite double their own pay. The council ought to have given pause before taking this tone-deaf action. Instead, they gave excuses.
Members said the raises were overdue. They said this has been discussed for years without action. They said an incremental increase for council members would only “prolong the discussion.” Heaven forfend.
But perhaps most amusing was the logic of Council President Pro Tem Elaine Hilber: “Most council members put in a lot of time, but we’re not necessarily compensated for it,” she said. “You know, this is no one’s full-time job on council. It’s just something we want to do to help the community. I don’t think anyone’s in it for the money, because it’s not enough to live on.”
Respectfully, if no one’s in it for the money, why the rush to so dramatically raise your own pay?
Why didn’t council do for itself what it did for our city workers? If raising the pay of city workers a little at a time over a period of years was good enough for them, the same should have been good enough for City Council.
We understand council members have responsibilities few of us would choose to take on. But they chose to. We assume they did so with eyes wide open as to what the job paid.
The first responsibility of a city council member is understanding and respecting that they, too, are public servants. Here, council failed at this core function. This is, plain and simple, self-serving and self-dealing, no matter how council members may wish to excuse the big bonus they granted themselves.
While too many people are feeling the stresses of a pandemic and economic uncertainty, City Council members put themselves first. That’s not just a lack of leadership, it’s a lack of judgment.
Perhaps we should find a silver lining. At least they didn’t make their big raise retroactive.
