UPDATED 12/9/24 9:23PM: The City Council failed to advance this bill on Monday. The vote was 6-5. It could be subject to reconsideration.

City Councilors on raising city pols’ pay: “Not it!” (via Facebook/Fenton campaign)

The Springfield City Council is wading once more into the fraught waters of their own salaries. A bill appearing on Monday’s agenda would raise the annual salary for councilors, the mayor and members of the School Committee. However, the increase would not be immediate. In fact, the actual dollar difference is unknowable now and, if passed, the body would likely not need to consider the issue again anytime soon.

As a practical matter, the Council cannot raise its own pay under state ethics law. Rather, it raises the pay for future City Councils. Indeed, while the law, as currently drafted, takes immediate effect, it does not make any change in pay for 2025. That will arrive in 2026 when the next Council sits, but it will not be a set dollar amount. Rather, the Council considering an automatic mechanism to raise the pay of elected officers in Springfield.

The salary bill is one of two pieces of major legislation before the Council at its penultimate regular meeting of 2024. In addition to the salaries, the Council will consider a bill loosening the city’s residency requirement for city employees.

Councilors currently earn $28,000 a year. Mayoral compensation is $175,000 annually while School Committee members make $18,000 per year. City electeds can receive benefits like health insurance and usually can contribute to, and benefit from, the city’s pension system. They do not accrue anything like vacation or sick time.

This is not the first time the City Council contemplated an automatic mechanism. It chose to use a raw dollar amount when it raised salaries in 2022. Nine years before that, there was discussion about indexing salaries to inflation.

There have been objections to outsourcing increase amounts to the consumer price index—the national rate of inflation—or some other factor. An argument against had been the charter would not permit this. This somewhat dubious as Massachusetts courts are generally not as rigid—or capricious—as federal courts are when siloing the branches of government. In any event, the Council never codified automatic increases.

If unintentionally, the new proposal nods a more in-house calculation. Rather than tying the increases directly to prices, the bill would link electeds’ salaries to cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) the Springfield Retirement Board (SRB) assigns. However, the language effectively caps such increases at 2%. Formally, it says the increase shall be the SRB’s COLA or 2%—whichever is lower.

Via six degrees of Kevin Bacon, Mr. Roosevelt would have a connection to the salaries of Springfield’s mayor, City Council and School Committee. (via Wikipedia)

Under state law, local retirement boards have some discretion to set COLAs for retirees. However, the decisions ultimately bear a relationship to the COLAs for Social Security recipients. The Massachusetts Public Employee Retirement Administration Commission (PERAC) announces the Social Security Administration’s decision. Retirement boards can set their COLAs at that percentage or go lower. They can choose a higher amount up to 3%, subject to approval by the local legislative body.

That would appear to give the Council input on its own salary via its review of retirement COLAs if barely. Not only would the lower of the PERAC-advised COLA or 2% prevail, but state law caps COLAs at 3%. For example, this year, Social Security raised benefits by 3.2% this year. However, local Massachusetts retirement boards could raise them no higher than 3% under state law.

Were the Council to set its compensation using the language currently in the bill, the worst city pols could do is pressure the SRB to max out COLAs during periods of low inflation.

One effect of this would be to ultimately cause the Council salary to drag relative to inflation over time. However, it would still be a much smoother increases than those that arose during the decades-long gaps between increases.

The change would also dispense with what has become a malodorous task for the Council. In a city with high poverty and lower wealth even among homeowners—relative to Massachusetts as a whole—bills to raise councilors’ pay quickly become flash points. (Notably, raising the mayoral salary attracts less rancor, but is often politically impossible without a Council bump.)

After an increase in 1997, officials tried several times to raise the mayor’s salary and its own before achieving a bump in 2013. That year, Council salaries rose from $14,500 to $19,500. A 2018 effort fizzled. Yet, a larger bump was approved in 2022, which took effect this year, raising councilors’ pay to $28,000. The Council President has historically earned an additional $500. The new bill raises the presidential premium to $1,000.

The 2012-2013 City Council did something no Council had done in 16years: pay itself more–well, technically not itself, but the next iteration of itself. (WMP&I)

Whether this modest—and, for now, technically zero dollar—increase will solve all the Council’s problems on this issue is hard to say. It could strike some voters as a weird flex after spending the better part of the last year demanding the tax burden tick down to incrementally limit rises in tax bills.

Still, punting the question of Council pay to (mostly) disinterested government bureaucrats provides some insulation. Moreover, it will be decades before an annual increase could be as big as the $8,500 boost of 2022. The first increase under the bill, as written, could not exceed $560. In other words, after nine years—the time between the 2013 and 2022 salary increases—the growth in the Council salary should be lower than that $8,500 raise.

One interesting and perhaps forgotten consequence is the impact on the mayoral salary. While raising the mayor’s salary has often had support from significant players like business groups, it also hovers in political punditry.  While Mayor Domenic Sarno has objected to increases sometimes, he has just as often said nothing. A mayoral spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on the pending bill.

It may be irrelevant for the eternal mayor, but a salary indexed to inflation may minimize how the office’s pay affects future candidates’ decisions to run or run again. (WMP&I)

Mayoral salaries often factor into retirement decisions. This applies to both for a long-serving executives like Sarno or future holders of the office. When the 2022 increase passed, the rumors was he would win another term, max out on the new salary and retire in 2027. (For others, the belief is only God or the voters will ever retire Sarno.)

Retirement for a government employee of Sarno’s vintage is calculated by averaging his three last years of work. Because he also meets other requirements, he could effectively get a retirement benefit worth 80% of his current salary. If the 2022 increase had not passed, he would be looking at up to $108,000 a year. Now, assuming he serve as mayor through December 2026, his annual pension could be as much as $140,000.

Indexing the mayor’s salary necessarily results in a much slower increase and thus slower increase in retirement benefits. Suddenly what has long been a lucrative, if banal fiscal calculation could matter a lot less for mayor and mayoral hopefuls.