001we're going to call this the order uh and get started so i'm going to start with the roll call um when i call your name there is one wrinkle under the oma now you have to state the location where you are so that would be city and state or township or village whatever so when i call your name please stay here and where you are located uh commissioner pressel here and i'm in ann arbor michigan commissioner weiner president ann arbor michigan commissioner harwood here ann arbor michigan commissioner hewitt here in ann arbor michigan commissioner janovich ann arbor michigan here and we have a quorum so uh before we get to business uh let me just i'll just go over the background of the body uh commissioner janovich am i saying your name correctly uh not
002a ch just uh uh general vic okay uh is new so for her benefit as much as anyone's i will just talk a little bit about the locc role llcc is a statutory statutory authorized body there's a state statute and then we have a local ordinance implementing it its role is to determine the salaries of the mayor and council it meets every odd number of year it meets for no more than 15 session days and it has to conclude its business within 45 days of the first meeting so the clock has started ticking now and since there's not 45 days left in the year we have to wrap this up by the end of the year once the commission makes its determination of the salaries it's transmitted to the council and it becomes effective unless
003council by resolution uh by two-thirds resolution adopts a resolution to reject the determination so it would have to be rejected by eight out of the 11 council members and so that's pretty much it for that does anybody have any questions about the process seeing none we will move on we do need to elect a chair for this uh session i think commissioner weiner was chair last time is that right that's right okay so if anybody's interested it's um relatively light work you simply introduce agenda items which i will assist with you ask for motions to move a resolution in seconds and you direct the discussion you basically call on people and make sure the discussion is on track um so is anybody would like to a volunteer and or then be nominated by somebody interest
004or experience and if brian wants to keep doing it that's fine too i'm seeing nobody if no one's willing to do it i will do it i did since i did last time i'd i guess prefer if someone else would but if i will if if no one else steps forward i i'm happy to be the chair if you prefer to not do it fantastic all right can i get a nomination from someone else so i'll move in a second or okay all in favor say hi hi hi hi all opposed it is done so um chair genovic the next item on the agenda is approval of the agenda can i get a motion for approval of the agenda so moved support al second um all in favor of approving the agenda hi i do
005we need to do individual voting for these if it's a voice vote and uh there's no opposed then we should be fine okay um all opposed and the approval of the agenda passes next we have public comment three minutes per speaker do we have any one from the public here i don't see anyone at the participant screen i see no one there is a delay of maybe 30 seconds between this what we're seeing and what's on the tv so uh let's give about a minute for folks to call in uh if anyone is watching and would like to comment there should be a phone number and meeting id on the screen you can call that phone number and enter the meeting id and then you will show up on my screen so we'll give just
006a minute for folks to do that if they would like i'll also point out for anyone watching if there's a desire to submit written comments they can be emailed to me the contact information is on the city webpage under non-regularly scheduled or electronic meetings and i do not see anyone so i think we can move on all right um the next item on the agenda is approval of minutes did everyone receive the minutes from the june 17 2019 meeting okay looks like everyone is okay with that uh chris are you going to share i can share them yeah if you would like yeah thank you okay is this can anyone can everyone see this one yes scroll down so reminder this is the last um meeting uh this was the i believe the third meeting
007of that year um the body had requested a change to the resolution which i prepared so it was a pretty quick meeting yes um that's correct [Music] does anybody need to see any more of this no i don't can i get a motion for approval of the minutes from the june 17 2019 meeting so moved support [Music] all in favor of approval of the meeting minutes from the june 17 2019 meeting say aye all opposed the approval of the june 2017 2019 meeting minutes passes and the next item on our agenda is the commission business i have a feeling that chris maybe has an intro to this yes so i will share again so just to go through a little bit of the background of this [Music] so the prior session in the body looked
008at the cpi change and the non-union wage change and did an average of those to determine the increase in the salaries in addition there was also a request for uh information from the council members as to how much time they were spending on their duties and the survey was done and based on that the locc decided to set the salaries for the council members at 50 of the mayor's salary which was an increase from where they were so based on that decision last time this draft resolution this year um does the same thing sets it at fifty percent of the merit salary for the council member's salaries and then determines the mayor's salary based on a average of the cpi for the previous year um would folks like me to go through the background materials
009that were provided would that be helpful no chris i do have a question i do not recall from two years ago did the council accept these pay raises they did i don't um i don't recall if a resolution was even introduced to reject um but it did the pay raises did go through okay bob being on the i think most of us were on the committee last year i think we did a pretty exhaustive examination [Music] and i am comfortable using the same formula that we used two years ago um but obviously that's just my own opinion so then i'll move to the draft so what we have and we had met earlier in the year um if i might um chris i was thinking it might be helpful for elizabeth's sake to recap a
010little more of the history um and you can tell me otherwise elizabeth but basically the way that we got to the last resolution was that as you know the commission meets every two years and so in not not in 2019 but in 2017 um we had made some decisions about how to calculate in increases that didn't necessarily rely on well didn't that's correct but that didn't rely on what's being done in albion or you know augusta or any place like that we were less concerned about what any other city in michigan or for that matter the united states pays their people because every uh city has its own set of you know it's got its own standard of living it's got its own um uh amounts of time like we have part-time people some people
011full-time people and so forth and so that's where we got the first decision was to use that combined cpi and i hope i'm saying this right cost of living anyhow using the union wage so that's where we got the decision to set increases at that percentage um basically once any increases had been calculated to the union uh schedule and uh etc we decided that that was probably the safest way to go and we reiterated that in 2019 although as chris pointed out to us then you know every two years it's a different thing we have the commissioners coming together there's no necessary precedent and you certainly can't bind few future commission decisions so that was part one that's how we got to that percentage how we got to the 50 or no less than 50
012percent for uh the council members was that we realized first of all that the mayor um you know he has he is a council person just like anybody else he or she uh but the uh position has traditionally been paid more than the council members what we were finding was that when we applied the percentage of increase that we were recommending that actually the gap was increasing uh mathematically between what the mayor was getting what the council people were getting because when you increase like you know 33 of 45 000 that's a bigger increase than if you increase a three percent on the fifteen thousand dollars so that's where we got the idea of making sure that uh council members would be paid no less than fifty percent of what the mayor was getting paid
013um now the other factor to know about is that uh if this if our recommendation is accepted it's accepted as to all portions so there's no distinction you can't say yes we want the council members salaries increase but we don't want the mayor's salary increased it's a package deal so that's the thinking that went into the no less than 50 percent and i think i've said enough but i just wanted you to know that because you had some questions um as a new person and i hope that answers some of them yeah that definitely does i you know i it is helpful for me to understand that you this the way it's being done now is set more about more along the lines of what is good for ann arbor rather than what maybe is
014good for another pound um i i'm a little what is the why are we using the 20 oh because we don't what's the 20 21 change in city non-union employee employee compensation well there was three percent and this was one item i wanted to uh mention to you all we switched um maybe it was in 2017 prior to that it had been on a calendar year that the sellers would change we switched to changing it on the fiscal year which makes a lot more sense for the budget for the city so we are now doing july to july which means so if you wanted to capture the 2021 inflation to some extent which we're not doing with this draft because it's based on one option would be to go to look at the fiscal year
015change in inflation um and if you look at that and i i did a quick draft which i'll just show you here if you did that july to july you'll see you're going to capture some of the inflation this year which is much higher obviously than it was previously as we all know um so this would be one other option in order to capture you know more of the two-year span than we had previously done to do the fiscal year change in inflation which unfortunately bureau of labor and statistics doesn't publish that as a separate sheet you have to kind of just look at the go into the data and look at the numbers um but then if you just averaged the four of them you would come up with 2.4 which reflects the average
016of the years so that's another option i wanted to put out there for you if you thought that was going to be more helpful than just uh doing the 2020. chris did you uh that cpi changed from july 2020 to july 2021 is that pulled from the bureau of labor statistics yep it's the cbi uh you which is the urban wage which i think we decided previously was most comparable to foreign yeah can you also clarify chris i can't remember since we do this every two years would whatever percentage we determine then let's say it's three percent would the three percent occur in each of the then the two years so that the second year would have a three percent increase over what we're approving for the upcoming year yeah you can structure it any
017way you want it was chosen to do that way with an average and then keep it the same for both years just for simplicity's sake okay so it's it's a rough it's a rough approximation yeah but you can do whatever you want okay if we stuck to the uh for lack of a better word formula or framework that we um agreed upon last time uh this change in your example here would be to reset what we have in our current draft resolution for 2023 uh to the new numbers am i understanding that right yeah this sort of yeah the resolution you have before before you is not this so you have to amend it to make it this if you wanted to okay thank you so i i would like to say i this seems
018more accurate to me um especially since it's been applied over over two a two year span and not just a one-year span uh this i mean it already seems the council members salaries already seem low to me anyway based on the amount of work that they do and i think we are all aware that they do an incredible amount of work especially um you know you i mean when you see people just constantly out there and communicating with their constituents and really really working hard i you know it certainly doesn't feel like a part-time job to me um i i don't know how much and i know that that you've stayed away from looking at other cities but when i was looking through all of the data that chris provided i noticed that lansing seem
019seemed like a good um comparable city i don't know how much work the um lansing city council members are doing um compared to what our city council members are doing but it's a similar population but they have 13 fewer meetings and they're at 25 19. i i think i i mean i i think it's a a good idea to keep that kind of i like the idea of the council members being half of the mayor's salary but i'm also wondering if maybe we're aiming a little low based on the amount of work that the council members are doing i think we had a similar discussion at our last meeting and i can't remember exactly the the answer to this so chris you could help out uh when we had that conversation was there some discrepancy
020in the way that um other city councils are set up as far as they were said as being um employees or had a set pay where ann arbor was uh maybe not it might am i remembering that correct or do i have maybe i'm just misremembering that uh you know there was a difference between them the mayor's right somewhere like full-time era somewhere part-time um but i can't remember about the city council members there's that uh there's the whether the mayor is full of part-time is one aspect also whether it's the mayor is the chief executive or not so in ann arbor the mayor is not the chief exec executive uh that's by the city administrator so that when you look at those salaries for various cities and the mayors you know in the hundred
021and thirties that's probably a chief executive mayor um the council members i don't know um if there's any real difference i think they all kind of serve the same function um but they're the way that the salaries are set in various communities may be completely different some may not allow any compensation some you know may have a local officer's compensation commission some may have a fixed compensation you know you see a few of them that are like five dollars or whatever so um but i don't i don't think there was any i don't think the duties are necessarily any different i would have to check whether or not they are specifically called out as part-time or full-time um i suspect that a city like detroit might have a full-time role whether it's stated or not
022in the charter or anything i suspect a job in detroit would take most of your time yeah thanks i again i i may have just kind of mixed up those two between the mayor and the city council two year two years uh between meetings is a long time thank you and i can we can always look in if you need more information if you want to look into lansing and you know what what their council members are do and how it's structured we can do that as well well i i'm a bit more of an incrementalist um i do appreciate the sentiment raised and i do appreciate the work that our mayor and city council undertake i guess my inclination is given the current inflationary um dynamic um rather than using this kind of the
023blended uh cpi and non-union wage increase uh for the two years um i guess my gut reaction would be to use the uh july 20 to july 2021 cpi and non-union wage increase so the 5.4 in the 3 which would then give it a 4.2 percent increase so it would it would acknowledge that i think inflation is going to be here for at least a bit um rather than it would you know greatly reduce the uh percentage increase in the upcoming two years if we did the blended for the for these two years so i guess my my suggestion would be to go with the uh except the the formula we've used in the past but just the the most recent year for cpi and non-union wage increase yeah um i don't have a problem
024with that obviously if you look at the numbers there's pretty dramatic change between uh the 1920 versus the 2021 um obviously the result of the pandemic um we certainly have experienced that inflation now and you say it does not look like it's going to be slowing down uh soon so i don't have a problem if we want to just use the uh uh blended number which you say would come out to 4.2 so here are my thoughts on that i think that as long as our recommendation makes sense uh it will receive the attention it deserves from the city council members who are after all the ones being paid and if they decide that we're over the top they will do as has been done in the past which is to reject it so we
025can certainly go for the higher number uh the questions that i have and i'm kind of of two minds about this are uh the last two years have been odd years and as the cost of living has gone up so has the cost of conducting government um at least i assume so and i am concerned about causing too much of an increase in city expenses under the circumstances although you know it's some people think of it as a drop in the bucket on the other hand and and before i get to the other hand i have never heard from any city council member or the mayor that they wanted a raise they will accept it or not but none of these folks are in it for the money we are very blessed with people who
026do not look at this as a source of necessary income on the other hand one of our goals is to encourage people who might find it challenging not to be compensated adequately for the work that they do to choose to run so those are my back and forth thoughts to the extent that it actually does more than theoretically perhaps serve as an incentive for people to include themselves in the running instead of excluding themselves because it is you know it's a position without benefits and um sometimes those extra couple of thousand bucks make a difference between being able to get by and not get by because right now it's still true that the people who tend to run are people who are well healed enough so that they don't need the money um so those
027are my thoughts i've straddled the middle quite nicely i think um well and to add them highly to the confusion um although i certainly just made the argument that we should just look at the last year another thought is that with a raise of 4.2 we may be sending a message in uh future union negotiations um that this is an acceptable um wage increase and you know that's something else i think we at least should keep in mind that although this is a small amount of money if this were applied throughout to all city employees that would be quite a different amount of money i have another another question that i think is going to inform maybe my opinion on it i actually i agree with changing that cpi uh time frame from the july
028to july to match that fiscal year that that we're talking about but on the um just overall general picture of our recommendations from last time in that draft how how does how do those numbers um affect or get put into the budget for the city for like four out years in other words they see our are kind of our draft for fiscal 20 uh was it 2022 and 2023 um from our last resolution do those get then kind of added into that budget or what they're planning for for those out years yes so the budget is is developed you know pretty much well it's developed all the time but um in earnest it begins kind of at the beginning of the calendar year so the budget for fy 2023 will start next january and these
029this determination will be in at that point so they'll be able to factor it in okay so in that respect kind of like back to what roger was saying about maybe changing those uh too much or outside of any i think he was talking in the context of just using the cpi framework what we have now is um and the half of the mayor's salary but i think if you go anywhere any too far beyond that even to elizabeth's point of trying to kind of get up to other city council salaries that might be too big of a jump um just from at least if i'm like looking at a budget saying what do we have to work with you're talking about um what do we say four percent increase or thereabouts on the cpi
030and if you look at the october numbers for cpi that was already at six six point two or something on a year-over-year basis so you know i'm not to say that's what it will be in two years when we meet again but um those are pretty substantial increases on a percentage basis and if inflation happens to go the other way during the course of those two years i don't think that we're necessarily locked into having to reduce these numbers kind of to your point elizabeth that way you might get a little bit of catch up um you know but not take the step back um i think that we were using this more as like a framework not necessary that had been set in stone when we when we talked two years ago and then
031that way we could make adjustments if we saw fit so i think i'm i'm with um the camp that says kind of use this revised cpi dates from july 19 to july i'm sorry july 2020 to july 2021 to match fiscal years but to keep that formula that we had and i think the unions have i mean back to what roger was saying the unions have their own negotiations and and what they're looking at and i think they're probably looking more at what comparable city employees working full-time are getting paid and the benefits that that accrue to them in those negotiations rather than the city council members maybe more so it's the mayor but i would i would think less to the city council i would agree with that i do think that in a
032certain sense uh what we do is a little bit of a vacuum because there aren't any real comparables and union you know union jobs have benefits that this job does not um it did occur to me one other fact that i remember from two years ago that was striking is that when we solicited information from the city council members and the mayor as to how much what their estimated hours were the interesting part was i i actually believe that most of them underestimated the hours that they put in um but the range when you discarded the one that was over 200 hours a month and the one that was under 60 a month and again these are just estimates that people tossed out everybody fell within 60 to 180 hours a month and when you
033average that that's 120 hours which probably is accurate at least for the people who underestimate it um and when you think about 120 hours per month most months aren't actually four weeks but if you describe full-time work as 40 hours per week that's 160 hours in a month and you have people with an average of 120 hours that they're putting in every month on a part-time job this is not a half-time job this is a modern job so you know it's one of the reasons i feel pretty committed to seeing to it that people's commitments are honored even if again they might choose to decide you know not this year we can always address it in two years i want to say also that in the years that i was not on this commission but
034through the 2000s i think that there were because of you know economic situation there were several times when the council denied itself increases probably three times out of four if that's possible so um we were kind of playing catch up by the time we got to 2017. [Music] elizabeth i'm curious to hear your thoughts well you know i i think that it is important to think about obviously the impact on the budget i my kind of gut reaction to it like i said before is that it seems like because this is not really a part-time job for the council members um or the mayor for that matter uh it it's a little low uh but i but i think that going with uh the 5.4 i i don't know actually you know what what do
035does anyone know what the city non-union um benefits are are they more are do they exist or how are they in comparison to any benefits that the city council members might have council members get no benefits but non-union city council people are excuse me non-union city employees get benefits that are not uncomparable to union benefits is that right i mean you try and keep them a little bit not sure about this but i know that washtenaw county does with the county what the union what the chief union gets the non-union employees typically get as well is there is that true of the city or not take this one yeah so our fringe benefits if that helps is about 33 so if you take salary it's about an additional 33 in benefits um they have been
036comparable um i would say over the last couple years though because as an attempt to stabilize the budget non-union hasn't been receiving the same increases or benefits that the unions have and we have a vaccine mandate which has also increased some benefits for unions and not non-union because we've negotiated the mandate with the unions we're taking into account the non-union wage change as well your i know your question was about benefits elizabeth but um i mean when you have one set of people who have no benefits whatsoever and their salaries are at the whim of people like ourselves it's just they really are in a separate category i'm just wondering if it um if it kind of unbalances the scale so to speak to add to to add in something that is really not comparable
037because if you're getting a three percent wage change but you also have 33 percent of your salary and benefits you have a you have more than a leg up on a person who doesn't have 33 percent of their salary and benefits that's a good point can i can i get just a point of clarification so the um the non-union city employees uh did you say they do get benefits but the city council members do not get benefits is that correct that's correct and that's because the city council members are not technically employees of the city correct they're not employees okay i just i just want to make sure i understood that correctly and then the union then the that 30 percent they were talking about that's that's for the union employees or is that that
038part of the salary of the non-non-union employees it's an average across all our employee groups is about 33 um like if i'm paid ten dollars you add on you know three dollars and thirty cents to that because our compensation our benefits package is worth about three thirty three percent okay thank you thanks what would go ahead i'm sorry i just went back kind of to my that very first question i was asking about whether the city council members were like employees um or not or full-time or part-time i think that might have been kind of in my head from a conversation we're having around the similar topic at our last meeting um i believe if they're being paid they're an employee but i think by law they're prohibited from getting benefits elected officials are that's
039my understanding anyway yeah that's true oh thank you so i i guess to fully answer the question about what i think um i'm wondering if we are applying the the non-union wage change um you know maybe it's maybe it's not really maybe it's skewing the accuracy of what we're trying to do which is give people a little more money and and make this a position that is palatable for and possible for people who don't have a very nice well-paying job otherwise um and if that really is um going to be part of the resolution that we want to make this we want to open these positions up for people who you know aren't um financially in a position to spend 30 hours a week on a job that pays them less than 25 000 a
040year you know maybe we should be increasing it just by the fiscal year cpi change so that would be the are you looking at like that for 5.4 percent elizabeth yes okay and you are you saying that because then uh that extra the extra amounts is kind of making up for the cost of benefits that the city council is not not getting or just in general it helps increase the amount uh more you know i don't know that there's a way that we could possibly make up for the lack of 33 in benefits that seems like a maybe i think that if we made that proposal i think the city council would shoot it down that's kind of like what juliet was saying you know i think that that's a thing that uh would not
041be in anyone's best interest um but maybe taking small bites at you know of the apple just to just to give a little bit of an increase um if that is the if that 5.4 is is the the cpi um for 2020 to 2021 then maybe that's maybe that is an appropriate increase um it's not a bridge too far and yeah i don't think that it would i don't think that we could do anything to make up for the 33 of benefits that's that would be a lot of money yeah i i i totally agree i mean i i was just just kind of trying to figure out because my only concern would be um if you so we had a kind of an unusually high cpi year-over-year and we'll continue the next month or
042so and maybe even the first quarter of next year and then after that it's gonna more likely than not tail off the the percentage increases if there are they they likely won't be as big right so um uh i guess if if we kind of get rid of that wage increase that's built into the non-union employees in this framework and cpi goes let's say one percent but then uh employees wages are you know three or four percent increase those out years are we going back to then kind of which is fine i'm not saying that it's not okay but then with the idea to be to kind of go back and relook look at the framework again kind of change that um i mean what are your thoughts on on that yeah i mean i
043that's i'm sitting here thinking well we don't have you know if we if we make a set in stone okay we're always going to use the cpi i i don't know that i would suggest that i would say that generally you know anything under a three percent increase in wage for the year is really low i mean it's really such a it turns into such an insignificant amount of money for a person um you know that i don't know if if if it would be right to go you know any to go much below that in the future but i think that's maybe a future discussion to have and i wouldn't suggest setting this in stone like i guess what i'm i'm thinking is that the next you know the last couple years have been
044very strange and the workload for people has been the learning curve has been steep and the workload has been hard it's been harder um in general so i i don't know but i'm i'm open to to certainly to other ideas about it i just i you know i keep going back to these these folks are not doing a part-time job you know listening to all this and looking at the numbers um if you use the formula we did in the past shows it's a 2.4 percent increase if we just take the 2021 numbers to 4.2 percent increase that difference comes out to about a year difference between the two i don't think that's going to have any impact on who runs or who doesn't run for council if we really want to attract a broader
045group to council we have we'd have to dramatically increase the wages for the amount of hours they're putting in these people are doing it because they want to do it and i don't think the money is that important i think symbolically it'd be better to keep with the average of the two years as we've done in the past at 4.2 because it sends a a message of fiscal responsibility to the rest of the city employees that do have a huge impact financially on the city budget so yeah we are in a strange situation yeah there's been a big jump in inflation it probably won't continue um probably may not even continue by the time the people start receiving these but the difference between uh taking two years versus one year's average is not enough money
046to make a difference really to probably anybody over the course of two years so i guess where i'm coming down is i would support keeping the um formula the way we did it uh two years ago which would be the average roger of the of the four the four percentages over the two years oh you're on mute sorry um yes that would be the average of the two of the if you're looking at the screen there the top of that second page average percentage change is 2.4 versus if we did just the 2000 2021 it would be 4.2 um at this this level i don't think that amount of money is going to have any impact on the individuals or iron council or may be considering running for council i'm kind of inclined to agree
047at this point although uh elizabeth my sympathies do lie with at least increasing the city council members salaries um this is not disrespect to the mayor but it's a lot of money that he gets and we are if we continue to do what we did from two years ago we are pegging the uh city council members salaries to his and so they aren't going to actually get we're going to increase his salary by whatever percentage we choose and then they get half of that so they do get slightly more a slightly higher uh increase than what it looks like when we set the percent change but yes you're right roger doing math always helps put things in perspective so i guess my next question is um if we're if we all know that we're not
048really making a change that would allow a person that would that would broaden the the spectrum of people who would be able to take the jobs if that needs to be removed from the resolution i mean if that if that goal is not being met by the resolution then does that need to be removed from it or is it just more of a hope like is it is it worded like a like a goal and this is the exact language from last year so um whatever changes you would like to make you can certainly do is a fair question i will tell you that um people are self-selecting for city council and um i did actually support someone in my uh neck of the woods that had a much lower income than his competitors but
049it didn't make any difference to him what what people were getting paid was not what mattered what mattered was whether he thought he could make a difference whether he thought his views would be of assistance to the government and so we we want to be more inclusive we look at ourselves and we recognize that the people who serve on council tend to be drawn from relatively well to do uh sections of the city but we're kind of making a stab when we say well we wanted to be more appealing to people for whom the financial incentive that could make it or break it i i think in fact the financial incentive is probably the last on the list of considerations in reality i've just never heard anybody say yeah if they paid another two or
050three thousand dollars on it because really it isn't just the service on city council which i think appeals to a lot of people it's the fact that you have to run you have to get support you have to get financial support and there are a lot of city politics that you know determine whether or not you're in or or otherwise so it really has to do more with what encourages people to throw their hats on the ring to begin with i wouldn't take it out because it is a hope that we have but i don't know there's any way to prove that it would make a difference is what i'm saying i mean i see it does say wish yeah i suppose that does indicate a hope yes yeah i agree for for myself personally
051i think it would be great if um if it was more money i think to to your point elizabeth so that it's more of like a a wage of a full-time job but to julie's point well two things one to julie's point is you know this a lot of people that are running for council aren't doing it just because that i granted i know that there's probably some people that don't run because of that um but from the financial perspective of it i i don't think that i can as a commissioner recommend that we increase it all the way up to that level without knowing what kind of leeway we have in the budget or what i mean you talk about basically like doubling the i know you're not giving that number but if you
052got up to that number of like what would be a full-time wage for that number of hours you you'd be up there pretty pretty good and um i don't think that i feel comfortable doing that without seeing hey from the city uh staff like yeah look here's a budget you got this much room to go if you want to you know go up there and it works knock yourself out but just from maybe that's because i'm a business owner and i know that i work in a different world right where like i have a budget and that's that might be part of it but at the same time i wish i could pay my employees more as well and if i could i would and maybe that's for next time or maybe chris can get
053a set but i'm pretty sure it sounds like the budget's set so um and that obviously can change my personal feeling is i i don't feel comfortable bumping it up that high but certainly having this framework and then at least moving it up with with cpi plus and or with our formula i think is a good start and the wish and hope that we can get up there would be great maybe we can one day maybe it'll be next year who knows for the following year i guess it would be two years from now i just wanted to be clear the budget is is not set yet the city administrator is still would be developing it at this point um and it would be set by the city administrator his recommended budget and then it
054goes to council in remember when it is february or march or april and uh then the council has the ability to then change it but um city administrator would take whatever determination was made by the llcc now and that would be incorporated into the budget so the money would be there there just there would be you know that much less money for the other things that's just it's not a problem to get into the budget i guess okay thank you i appreciate that so we're kind of going we're kind of going uh backwards instead of starting from the budget going down working our way into that budget line we're kind of saying here's what we want to spend work it into our overall budget that you're working on so how i understand it yeah i
055mean it's just effect it's just a fact for them that council salaries exist and so whatever they are that goes in the budget and then you work around it so if we say let's double just just throwing out a number let's just double the amount as our recommendation then the city administrator says okay now i'm going to double that amount in the budget for those salaries is that even before the city council um votes okay all right i think he's recommended it would be in his recommended budget gotcha okay if the council does not adopt would then become the budget so that's the fallback if council it's also the ability to look at the budget and change things but if they can't agree and don't adopt a final budget the city administrator's budget is the
056default and it goes into effect okay i hope that cleared up for everybody else like it did for me i think we need to also consider that if we were to suggest an increase that was that this ends up being a political decision on the part of sitting city council members and i think if if we come in with too large of a proposed increase it will make it very difficult for them politically to um let it let it slide basically let it become uh approved so you know and i i just thinking personally i think if we if we were to recommend something over five percent frankly i think we run the risk that that politically it becomes tough for council members to accept what it is that we're recommending so i just want
057to throw that into the mix that this is ultimately a political decision as well and and council members need to need to um assess you know how how how large of increase they're willing to accept before they feel like the political pressure is there for them to reject the increase that we're recommending what if we were to recommend a lower percentage and increase the um council member salaries increase the that 50 number to maybe and and use that as the kind of the standard that's a good question does anybody remember how we came up with the 50 number of the mayor's salary was that maybe based on that survey we did of hours spent no again it had to do with the fact that when we were dealing with a across the board standard percentage
058increase whatever it was that it wound up widening the gap between the mayor's salary and the city council members rather than narrowing it or even keeping it the same because as i said earlier three percent increase to 45 000 is substantially more than a three percent increase to fifteen thousand dollars and i'm i'm just pulling numbers out here but what we were trying to do was make sure that the gap didn't widen more than fifty percent so in fact whatever whatever increase in uh whatever percentage increase we would give the mayor it actually would have a slightly higher effect on the city council people i i think that some of us are troubled again no slam against mayor i think some of us are told about the gap between the city council members and the
059mayor precisely because the mayor is himself a city council person and what he does over and above being a city council person is i don't know i don't want to say largely honorific because he may be doing things that i that go beyond that but i personally would support very strongly any mechanism by which we could increase the relative um pay of the city council members just because i think that we're marching toward fifty thousand dollars for the mayor eventually and i kind of i don't care if we go there but i kind of like to see the city council pace catch up um i just we have to come up with a rationale that is acceptable to people the fairness i suppose hearing this could i suggest we keep our formula for determining the
060percentage increase which would be [Music] come out to the 2.4 percent but we increase the city council percentage of the mayors from 50 percent to 55 percent i could back that that makes me feel a lot more comfortable with with kind of the direction this is headed and supporting what we're trying to to achieve that that wish and i think that we're this that seems like it's more in line with supporting what we're what we're actually trying to achieve in which case what we want to build into our resolution is this specific goal that we recognize the disparity we have to say it nicely about disparity between what the city council members are getting paid and what the mayor's getting paid as kind of the city person with an extra crown um and that we
061want to narrow that gap because we see that as inequitable however we favor it i think that that needs to be part of the resolution because that explains why we're bumping it up because you know even we don't follow what we do every two years without reminders nobody else is going to know so saying it straightforwardly helps i'm sorry go ahead roger i'll just say i i think you know the focus generally tends to be on what the mayor's getting paid he's getting a 2.4 increase everybody else is the same percentage i don't know if people will even even notice that but i it does if we put that in the resolution make it clear what our intentions are going forward i think i don't have any problem if if the mayor has more responsibilities
062to get to get paid more that's that shouldn't be a problem i think elizabeth and roger that those ideas to increase that city council's percentage of what the mayor is getting is a really simple solution while keeping that same framework um because that gap i think that julie was concerned with earlier won't won't get any bigger uh it'll be proportional along the way with if we keep that formula in place um i don't in 55 again i'm not sure how we came up with the 50 of the mayor's salary versus the 55 in the first place or the 60 i can't remember if that was because we did that survey of hours or if it was just maybe more of an arbitrary like that start here um i i think 55 or 60 is a
063fine number to start with but keep a framework i when when i joined the the local officers compensation commission there wasn't a framework at all it was um entered the fault of no one but it was just here's what the salaries were here's what other um municipalities are are being are paying city council and mayors then for new people coming in like myself and like you elizabeth's kind of like how are you coming up with these how did you come up with these numbers and so at least it's a good place to start and i think it's helped this year i don't know if everybody else would agree but i think it's nice to have i appreciate the sentiment however i did some quick math uh under the assumption of increasing city council from 50
064to 55 this is not going to be exactly right but it looks like it's about a 11 or 12 percent pay increase for city council members and i just think that's personally way over what uh politically would be um acceptable i'm sorry i'm just being kind of math blind i'm trying to follow this if we take the same approach as we did two years ago which is to say that the city council members are to be paid no less than 50 percent of what the mayor's paid and we give the mayor an increase of 2.4 are you sure that this means an 11 increase for the city council members if we're saying that in addition to the formula that we are now paying council members 55 of what the mayor makes under this new with
065this cost of living or this increase but now we're paying 55 instead of 50 it's that change that is the the vast majority of the reason that that uh net compensation the council goes up by that kind of percentage roughly 10 or so it looks to me like it's about point eight eight i mean like eight point eight eight percent i think if we do a 2.4 increase to the 47 452 63 which was the 2021 compensation i know everybody should be doing this math along with me so that i'm not the only one but but it looked like um then that if you divide that number in half i mean not in half but if you if you make if you take 55 percent of that number and then divide that divide the 2021
066compensation by that number i come up with 0.8878162 but maybe that's wrong it would me i got 10 am i in but um i just did the difference so i did 55 of the mayor's salary in 2021 was 26 098.95 versus what it's at right now at 23 7 26 32. i think that difference divided by the 23 7 26 32 and i got 10 percent that sounds right actually i think because i was using the i i used it i used one of the wrong one of the wrong numbers okay but it's called it's close enough right i think to to the earlier point that it's just it's a much bigger increase my question is uh as far as the like political um the politics of it do you think that the city council
067would just see that then and flat out like just reject it because they don't think it's politically feasible and um should should we as a as a commission be taking that into account uh um and i'm not saying that we should we shouldn't necessarily but is that just something that our commission is uh supposed to be you know factoring into our decision i don't maybe you can talk on that chris there's no parameters really okay i can tell you can consider whatever you want yeah i think that we pitch and they either catch or they throw it away it's up to them it's a two-part thing in a way we're kind of we're fail-safe because if they don't like it they can vote it down um the numbers do make a difference though maybe something
068a little less than 55 but you know eddie you'd asked about this before we picked 50 because it was already clear that we were approaching something that wasn't so far away from a one-third and we wanted to make sure that they that the city council members didn't continue to be left in the dust because we were applying a pure percentage scale so i could go with sticking with the 50 i could go with increasing it or 55 comes out to be too high an increase for people's uh appetites we could go with less i kind of like to increase it from 50 just because um even though we do not bind future commissions i like the fact that we've got a bit of a pattern here and people can see where we're going [Music] so
069i'd be open to 55 i feel a little less than 55 i would say we do need to stick with no less than 50 i i could definitely support 55. i know that it it comes out to 10 but i think that if the city council members i don't think they should feel like it is not politically feasible to accept because it it's a really hard job and and maybe that isn't clear to everyone it certainly is clear to me you know when you have people on average spending 30 hours a week giving them 55 of the mayor's salary doesn't seem like like it's it's too much chris can you clarify if council were to reject our recommendation or take up action on it does that mean they would get zero percent for the next
070two years stays the same do it just stay the same that's the risk is that we actually yeah it would still be our face yeah you're saying it would stay the same as what we have in that draft resolution or what what we had before yeah the current fy 22 salaries you know and i i wouldn't couch it as risk exactly i suppose if you were going to think of it in terms of risk you know our credibility might be a little bit in the tank but you know this is the way it's supposed to work if we feel that you know if we feel that we can endorse a recommendation and they feel well that's nice but we don't need it that's the way it's supposed to work commissioner weiner do you think that
071it would be more palatable for it to be a if we did a smaller step up maybe a 53 instead of a 55 potentially um you know the other thing that troubles me a little bit and you know i know any percentage that we set even when we you know um approve the 50 of what the mayor makes someone could argue well what are you basing that right so any percentage we would select could raise questions about well why why did you choose 52.5 or why did you choose 55 right and there really is no solid and there's no methodology there's not a formula like we have with the cpi and the non-union compensation that's one of the reasons i like the kind of where we're at we've we've made the precedent with the 50
072we've made the precedent with the combination of the two um formulas to come up with uh annual escalator that's where i i kind of come down thinking we are in a decent place um with with a structure that is defensible there's precedent for it um so that's why my collision and to recognize the current inflationary pressures to just to use the one year instead of the two-year average at least boost it to 4.2 for the upcoming two-year period i guess that's where i end up coming down is that i like the structure of where we're at like the president of the 50 um i just and politically i think it's that that's a an increase that would i think by most uh objective people looking at it would say that's that's a reasonable that's a
073reasonable increase to be providing so it passes the kind of the smell test of this yeah this seems like a reasonable uh number to to be at and in a process by which we determine that increase [Music] so really what it comes down to is do we keep the structure of a system that we have sort of put together over the last four years that's kind of working it's limping along at least does better than what we had before versus address what is an issue that we all recognize which is the gap between the mayor and the remainder of the city council people um it's certainly true that if we put in our resolution that we're going to go we'll just pick a number 55 that it's for the purpose of narrowing the disparity because
074the council recognizes that the work that each of these city council people puts in is enormous it's definitely beyond what any part-time job calls for so that's really what we're kind of risking if you will as we're saying we like what we've done so far but there's still this traditional thing that we want to do this sense of fairness equity parity whatever so this is the direction we want to go in and that's kind of where we're sticking out our necks so to speak i don't mind doing it um but i understand your position yeah i think i think we went back and kind of did the mayor's salary based on looking at those other uh cities and townships right and like who was part-time and not and but to your point uh commissioner weinert
075is that 50 percent uh what's other than we want to close the gap like julie said how did how are we coming up with 53 55 60 right other than that particular reason um i i totally understand that point as well i think if if you say the reason is to just close the gap that's that's one thing right and uh and go with it but um it's kind of an arbitrary pick at this point right because if you're looking at 55 percent of the mayor's salary that's like a 10 increase if you look at 53 that's like a six percent increase so what's the objective i guess and maybe as a commission we just need to say what we're what our objective is so one one weakness that i see in terms of buttressing
076our support for closing the gap and i'm not really talking about closing the gap but just minimizing the disparity um is that two years ago when we did solicit this information uh i don't want to say it was done on the fly it's more of the case that every time that you ask city council people what their estimates are of people uh somebody like chris sends out emails and half answer them and half don't ever or you know a quarter of them answer late and they're again in my estimation they were all under estimates but at least we had some data kind of on the fly to work with when we set that 50 percent mark and it was in recognition that they were working so hard we don't have that data at this point
077now we could hope we could if we wanted to ask for that data again if only because we have a lot of new city council people and it would be interesting to see what their estimates are uh that of course means that we would continue this meeting after that data had been received and then make a decision at that point i don't know from a practical standpoint uh how much burden that would be on you chris especially since we would certainly ask that with less than 45 days before the end of the year that you not only send out these emails but chase people down you know which means assigning people to nae [Laughter] yeah i can certainly do it um i mean i have the kind of the template from last time i can
078dig that up because certainly i do not want as i think about it if we're trying to make a case for making more than 50 okay uh it doesn't help to rely on the data from two years ago even if it were identical to what we received today from the current city council members would just want to have fresh information i hope that nobody was underestimating as drastically as they were last time so that would be a way of sitting on it and thinking about it and seeing if we can get more information but i guess if a fair question at this point is if the majority of the commission at this point is not inclined to change from the 50 then it's not worth going out to make the effort to collect that information
079if uh the majority of the commission is willing to at least consider the possibility of a more than 50 percent increase to compensate people fairly for the amount of time they're putting in then we want that information so should we take a straw vote and whether there's support for keeping the cpi and the formula was used in the past but increasing the percentage something above 50 percent i would be willing to do that okay i would be willing to do that i would be willing to do that i i think i would be willing to do it if we capped it to 53 only because that's a six percent increase and if you look at the october cpi year over year that's six percent uh so does two things it closes the gap slightly with
080the mayor's salary but it doesn't move it any higher than what the the current october to october cpi number was for 2021 to 2020 on the october bls i think it was uh it was 6.2 percent um so you're not increasing any more than that for for this one time this one year we're closing the gap and then keeping our framework in four years going forward i would be in support of that but to go any higher than the 53 percent um i think the commissioner weiner's point probably that's probably pushing it without any further data and i don't think we really need to do that at this point i appreciate this i i think we'll end up in the same place i i guess where i'm coming from is rather than changing that 50
081percent uh um threshold um to to set it to a formula and we could choose to say let's look at what the current cpi is of 6.2 or whatever it is and approve uh uh that 6.2 based on a conscious decision of a formula in this case whatever the current cpi is rather than arbitrarily changing the percentage from 50 to 52.5 or 54.7 um to keep it at 50 but then let's let's just look at the the the formula this time given the inflationary pressure is to acknowledge the 6.2 or whatever it is and we're making the decision based on that rather than adjusting the 50 percent are you suggesting making a a 6.2 increase to the city council and making a smaller increase to the mayor i guess i'd be suggesting a 6.2 for
082the mayor and then uh council would get you know 50 of whatever that ends up being that number ends up being for the mayor so to me it that is not helping us do what we what we're trying to do i think in part which is i'm hearing i'm hearing other people express that they want to reduce that gap between the city council and the mayor salaries and i think the only way to do that is to start saying okay every year or every two years we are going to look at this and address it and consider a blank increase of that percentage so be it a two and a half percent increase or a two percent increase or a three percent increase whatever it is that we come up with today maybe it's just
083something that we have uh for the future for other people i mean if you know if if some of us aren't here um or if the commission changes maybe we have that um in the minutes so we can look back and say okay that's part of what we did that's that's what we decided we decided that we would start considering every time we meet to make that gradual the gradual increase and i i i appreciate that i guess my question would then be what's the end game that we eventually get up to and i understand that the commission will change over time but to get to 60 to get 65 percent what what are we what are we ultimately trying to achieve here other than kind of philosophically say let's get council closer to what
084the mayor is making i'm afraid i have to leave for at least a few minutes to open up my business i'm gonna have to leave in in five minutes or so for a meeting commitment i have may i ask uh we did a straw vote on who would support a percentage increase at least with conditions uh i am hearing less enthusiasm perhaps for gathering information again is that correct or do we think that that might be helpful if we wanted to try and buttress the argument of an increase [Music] i personally i i'm not sure unless we know what we're going to do with the data to take the time to to collect it um i'm not sure we need to do that unless we have a specific reason for doing it and then using
085that data to make a decision if we're just going to collect the data and look at it and kind of just i don't know just look at it and kind of debate it i'm i again i don't know if that takes i think to to commissioner miner's point is like more importantly what's the end goal of of of closing that gap like do you stop at a certain point or do you you go all the way at some point and maybe that's what the data that you're looking for julie is going to point you to but you know that to some point we can set that maybe idea in our in our our resolution but those future commissions will have to determine that as well so my personal preference is not to collect any more
086data but maybe just set this idea that commissioner weiner is saying is do we have an end goal an idea of what that might be and then determine if we're going to do this increase and how much it is okay i'm fine with that i just felt you know if you're trying to make a stronger case sometimes it helps to say yeah we did this again and this is what people said but yeah it's it's a lot of uh work to go to if we're already feeling like we can justify it without i mean considering the the numbers that we're dealing with i don't know how strong a case we need to make people either like the recommendation of the loan so i'm fine with that so do we think we can make a decision
087today or is this something that given the time constraints we should come back and do another session i guess i would appreciate since i have to leave very shortly here and maybe to just give us a little time to just think about all the issues that have been raised today and then maybe chris as staff if you could uh at least do some calculations on if we did increase the the relative percentage uh at one percent increments or something what what the implications of that would be in terms of the overall compensation uh for the mayor and for council members so at least we have the kind of the the fiscal data to look at as part of this and just be able to think about it a little bit come back in a week
088or so or maybe up right after thanksgiving and um and try to finalize it at that time would you be looking you'd be looking for like between 50 and 55 what would each of those that would be my sense unless somebody else wants to push it beyond the 55 no no 55 is the most anybody's probably going to give us yeah i mean i would even say 50 to 53 is probably adequately high enough and again as long as we include in our resolution the explanation for it you know you've set forth your basis yeah yeah i would suggest somebody uh work on a draft of that for circulation for next time so that we could have that if that was the way you wanted to go [Music] the rationale that is sure all right
089i need to go i apologize um i don't know chris if you can maybe just do a a follow-up doodle or something uh even today to get our next meeting scheduled if that can work for folks yeah is after thanksgiving what people are sure that would be the first week of december right yep i'll look there is anybody not able to meet i guess we have the november 29th and 30th that's monday and tuesday yeah yeah well this is urgent so uh is roger going to be surprised when we find out that the meeting's over you folks are welcome to stay on i just need to i need to go so can we do a motion to postpone to the next meeting please how do we have enough people yeah yep we do okay okay
090and then uh communications anybody have any communications no and so then motion will entertain a motion to adjourn so moved yeah i think we second uh if not i say all favor i think we did this but okay i mean it's adjourned okay thank you all hey good conversation people appreciate it all right take care you