How Sacramento cops got a sneaky pay raise says nothing good about the city | Opinion
Even though the Sacramento City Council is thinking of taxing you more, city staff can miraculously and quietly find millions of dollars to pay themselves and city employees.
Last month, the Sacramento City Council ever-so-stealthily implemented 5% raises for city police that created a $7.1 million hit to a city budget that hadn’t set aside money for the higher pay.
Neither the council nor city staff expressed a peep of concern that the city’s structural budget deficit, projected at more than $60 million for the next fiscal year, would dramatically grow. Rather, the fiscal impact was described as downright painless.
“The City will use any available prior year savings and funding budgeted for classification and compensation adjustments to finance these cost increases, the staff report said. In other words, there is plenty of slop in the $1.6 billion budget to soak up this unanticipated cost.
Meanwhile, the mayor wants to increase a real estate transfer tax for homeless and housing needs. And the council is reviving the idea of a higher business operations tax on doctors, dentists, and just about every commercial enterprise in the city.
It too often feels like there is a double standard inside City Hall, where there always seems to be the money for staff needs and that taxes are needed for everything else. The problem is magnified because spending and revenues are out of whack. Until the city confronts this financial elephant in the room, why should voters endorse bad budgeting by approving a tax increase on a future ballot?
The way council members and staff snuck this police raise by the public at its Sept. 9 was deceiving to the point of being dishonest. I was monitoring the meeting and the police raise went unnoticed because it wasn’t clearly pointed out in the council agenda. Check out this word salad of city speak on the item in question:
“Approval of the Removal of Fire Assistant Chief and Fire Marshal Classifications from Representation by the Sacramento City Exempt Employees Association (SCXEA), Placement into Unrepresented Unit 20, Approval of the Salary Adjustment for the Utilities Operations & Maintenance Superintendent, and Approval of the Employer-Employee Relations Policy, Salary Schedule, and Personnel Resolution Covering Unrepresented Officers and Employees.”
How the police won in arbitration
Key information on the raise was buried four pages into the agenda item’s staff report. The contract for the Sacramento Police Officers Association had expired at the beginning of the year. Negotiations went nowhere and, the council privately declared an impasse on July 10. Consistent with the city charter, “the dispute was submitted to an Arbitration Board,” the staff report said.
The city has since provided me the decision of professional arbiter John LaRocco. The city had offered police a 2.5% raise with no back pay. Police sought the 5% effective January of this year.
“The parties have a history of providing law enforcement employees with retroactive pay, both through arbitration and negotiation,” LaRocco wrote in his decision. And as for pay, “the data demonstrates that the police officers are below the market mean and median for salaries.”
The council neither approves nor rejects an arbiter’s decision. But it does oversee the city budget. Rather than cut some other expenses to accommodate this new one, the staff had conveniently found the money.
Why the real city deficit is bigger
That looming budget deficit is actually much worse than the numbers suggest. Per the city’s budget custom, it never sets aside money for city raises until they are approved by arbiters or the council.
For every 1% increase in pay for all city employees, future costs (as in the budget deficit) grows by nearly $5 million, according to Sacramento Finance Director Pete Coletto.
Next year, Mayor Kevin McCarty and his new city manager will confront fundamentally different approaches to the financial challenge before them.
Is it more important to maintain city services, even if some can be performed more efficiently by the private sector? Or is it more important to maintain the city staff, and if necessary, reduce services?
Something tells me that most of the public want their services protected, while the nine Democrats on the council are loath to get on the bad side of a labor union of any kind.
If this mayor and council rise to the occasion and demonstrate that Sacramento is being smarter stewards of the public’s money, it will have laid the groundwork for a proposed tax increase. But that hasn’t come close to actually happening.
It was just too easy last month to implement that healthy raise for police and pretend there was no financial pain, which defies reality. The police raises made the real budget problem that much harder.
This story was originally published October 29, 2025 at 5:00 AM.