Sacramento City Council, Mayor Darrell Steinberg to get raises. How much will they make?
The Sacramento City Council and Mayor Darrell Steinberg are getting raises.
The city’s Compensation Commission approved the raises Thursday. The eight council members’ annual salary will increase from $91,915 to $96,257. Steinberg’s will increase from $136,789 to $145,440.
The commission looked at other cities comparable in size and structure when determining the raises, as the city charter requires. Those cities included San Francisco, Denver, Fresno, Long Beach, Oakland, Portland, San Diego, San Jose and Seattle.
The mayor and council’s new salaries roughly fall in the middle of the range for those nine comparable cities.
Commission Chairman Arthur Scotland originally suggested a larger raise for the mayor, which would have brought him to a salary of $179,844. Commissioner Tiffani Fink raised issues with the optics of granting big raises during the coronavirus pandemic.
“I just have a hard time with how we stomach spending these kind of increases when no one in Sacramento is seeing them,” Fink said. “I don’t know how we explain that to the public.”
Scotland disagreed. “I realize there might be some unhappiness, but we have to follow the law,” he said. “If citizens are unhappy, they can change the code, they can change the city charter.”
Ultimately, the commission settled on the lower figure for the mayor’s salary, after examining the Denver mayor’s salary figure more closely, and matching the total compensation amounts.
To avoid a situation of the council giving themselves raises, the charter tasks the commission with setting annual salaries for the mayor and council that are “reasonable and consistent with other cities similar in size and structure.”
In April 2019, the commission raised the council salaries from $71,850 to $91,915. That large jump occurred because the commission started considering the council jobs as full-time instead of part-time positions.
There were no changes in benefits or perks, which are not included in the salary figures.
The raises will be effective on June 19, ahead of the new budget year starting July 1.
This story was originally published April 23, 2021 at 2:54 PM.
