Last night, Trenton’s City Council met in a regularly-scheduled session. As had been reported the day before, Council did not discuss or vote on the Salary Range Ordinance #16-50 or the implementing Resolution #16-591, having postponed the matter until its upcoming October 20 meeting. However, a few members of the salary petition Committee attended the session. Mike Ranallo and I addressed Council, Jacky Vargas and Dan Dodson did not. City Clerk Richard Kachmar attempted to prevent us from speaking during the portion of the meeting reserved for Public Comment only on docket items scheduled for the evening session; he wanted us to wait until the end of the meeting, during the General Comment period. I replied that public notice of the session included the salary measures as scheduled docket items, so I was going to speak about them. My comments are posted below.
Council did not reply directly to Mike’s or my comments, nor did they speak about the salaries question at all. However, Member Alex Bethea did make some remarks that addressed our remarks in general. In doing so, he proved once again that he is perhaps The Dumbest Person in Trenton public life, and that is a crown for which there are many, many contestants.
He said he appreciated our comments and our interest in the matter, but that we didn’t understand the need for the City employees in question to receive some salary increases, a little “bump,” after so long without any raise. He totally mischaracterized our position on the matter, since we – last month and this – expressed our endorsement of reasonable Cost-Of-Living Adjustments (COLA’s), as long as they were not retroactive, and implemented only with the adoption of a formal full-year City Budget. This distinction was apparently meaningless to him, but no matter.
What moved his comments from the category of merely annoying to offensive was his defense of the record of the Administration. He parroted Mayor Eric Jackson’s line about their record being less than “perfect,” and he did acknowledge what he stated as “some mishaps here and there” (I’m asking for a CD of the audio recording of the session so I can get his exact statement).
Some. “Mishaps.” Here and there.
Really. He said “mishaps.” I was tempted, at the end of the evening, to reply to him and ask him what he considered to be some of those “mishaps,” listing a few of the likely candidates. If he considered things like: messing up the IT and swimming pool contracts; or getting rapped on the knuckles in an audit identifying $105,000 of disallowable expenses during 2014; or getting swindled, in slow motion, of $4.7 Million Dollars by our payroll company. If he considered episodes like those to be mere “mishaps,” I’d be curious to know what he’d considered out-and-out unambiguous fuck-ups!
But I resisted the temptation. After watching Council work for a few hours, I was anxious just to leave, you know?
Anyway, the next step in the salary matter for those citizens who expressed their support in opposing the City’s initial proposal of granting 15% increases over the next three years will be to wait and watch.
As you will read below I, on behalf of our Committee, stated that we will continue to oppose any revised plan by the City that proposes to grant any discretionary increases to management personnel (and these non-contractual increases are, in fact, purely discretionary) that are retroactive in any way, and which would be implemented before the City adopts its Annual Operating Budget for the fiscal year that began on July 1, nearly 3 full months ago. Proposed discretionary raises must be considered in the context of all of the other budget items the City proposes, and all of those set against the anticipated revenue resources we expect to earn or otherwise receive this year.
If Council passes next month an Ordinance and Resolution that allows retroactive payments of their bumps, and if they pass these before an Annual Budget is adopted – even if the increases are nominal Cost of Living Adjustments – we will circulate a petition to overturn that Ordinance.
Stay tuned to this space.
Comments as delivered to City Council, September 15, 2016:
Mr. President, and Members of Council – On behalf of 160 citizens of Trenton, I present to you this evening a petition, which was hosted on Change.org, objecting to the adoption of Ordinance #16-50. This petition has, of course, no formal legal force, but I hope will provide some sense of public opposition to the plan as it was introduced last month.
We understand that further action on this Ordinance and accompanying Resolution #16-591 has been continued to Council’s October 20 session, to allow further deliberation an research, a decision I applaud. Please be advised, however, that should you and your colleagues on Council approve this Ordinance 16-50 and Resolution 16-591 in substantially their present forms, implementing specific salaries for the Mayor and several officials retroactive nine months to January 1 of this year, these 160 – and more – Trentonians will sign an official petition to overturn the Ordinance.
Mr. President, last month the Administration presented – and Council approved 5-1 ! – a proposal to grant salary increases amounting to over 15% above current compensation to these officials over the next three years. It was extensively described by Business Administrator McEwen as a move predicated on fairness to employees who have not seen raises in their classifications in over ten years, even though, of course, many of the current incumbents in these job titles have only had their positions for slightly over two years. The BA said, and I quote, “All we are looking to do is take the 2005 salary grid that we are currently at, look to implement the 2008 Ordinance that was approved by Council at that point in time,” unquote, before that Ordinance was later overturned in Court.
During your discussion on the topic, you all – Council and the BA – spent a great amount of time revisiting those events of 2008 and 2010. Now, I remember 2008 and 2010. There are a lot of things I miss from that time that aren’t around anymore: Pontiac. Oldsmobile. “Battlestar Galactica.” “Celebrity Family Feud with Al Roker.” Capital City Aid.
All these things are all gone now. They may continue to fill the airwaves and roll down our streets, but they are gone. Irrelevant to how things are now. The world, including our small piece of it, has changed utterly since 2008. Your discussion on August 18 was, somehow, bafflingly, conducted entirely without recognition of this basic fact.
The City’s finances have transformed since 2008. Capital City Aid, and its near $40 Million in financial assistance to the City’s annual budgets, was canceled in 2010 by our Current governor. It’s gone. Replaced by “Transitional Aid,” which you remember, by its name, is something that is designed to go away eventually. As it stands now, the City receives financial assistance at only about HALF the level it did in 8 years ago. Transitional Aid is definitely not your father’s Oldsmobile. As you review the Administration’s proposal over the next month, you must keep that in mind. What we have to work with as our benchmarks are not 2008 salary ranges, nor 2008 revenues, but the resources and expenses we have in 2016. Here, and now, is where we must start.
Despite that, the Administration – the Eric Jackson Administration – presented a plan, in writing, OVER the name of the Business Administrator but IN the name of the presiding Mayor, which definitively and unambiguously detailed raises totaling 15% above current levels, over the next three years, for the Mayor, the BA, the Chief of Staff, the Chief Municipal Judge and other Municipal Judges, as well as all Department Heads and Division Directors.
The Mayor has spent much of the last several weeks disowning his plan. He hadn’t read the memo, he said. It was a mistake, he said. He “no way in heck” didn’t intend the raises to be 15%. He always intended these raises to be a small cost-of-living adjustment for this and next year. 1.5% this year. 1.5% next year. City Council, you guys, would have the power to do this or not. It was all a misunderstanding. There was “confusion.” So he says now.
Let’s be entirely clear. The proposal, in writing – in this memo – was unambiguous: Mr. McEwen wrote, “Upon second reading [of Ordinance 16-50], presuming no substantial changes, it is our intention to also introduce a Resolution fixing specific salaries within the ranges as noted below.”
All of those salaries were pretty carefully calculated for all employee categories over three separate years. By 2018 salaries were 15.5% higher than the current salaries for all but the Chief of Staff, who was awarded a 19.7% increase.
That memo addressed to City Council was dated July 15, a full month before the matter was discussed in open Council session. That’s a long time for the Mayor to “not have read the memo”. A long time for a BA not to have discussed a salary plan with his boss that personally benefited the both of them. And a very long time for all of you not to have made any comments nor raised any objections.
On August 18, you voted for that plan. Five to 1. That was no “mistake.” That was not “confusion.” That was a bad decision.
This was, simply, a proposal that would spend more than the City can afford at present. A proposal made without an approved City Budget against which this can be evaluated. A proposal made when the City’s finances are more fragile than ever. And a proposal that would, in its effect – as I said to you last month before you voted to do the very thing – reward the very same Administration for all of the failures and legitimate “confusion” and “mistakes” of the last two years. And this was a proposal that the Mayor abandoned when he was challenged on it. By every citizen who spoke here on August 18, by the press, and by any citizen who wondered what the hell you all were thinking for proposing 15% raises in this climate, and how the hell you guys voted 5 to 1 in favor of it!
Mr. President, you and your Council colleagues now have an opportunity before you to take the Administration’s revised proposal, and fix it.
Yes, let’s try to provide cost-of-living adjustments, but not retroactive in any way. Tie the approval of any COLA’s not to the beginning of the calendar year, which would – by the time you consider the revised proposal next month – provide for almost 10 months of retroactive back pay increases– but to the adoption of the City’s Fiscal Year budget, and make them effective from the date of that budget’s adoption. You need to ensure that discretionary increased costs – and to be frank, that’s what these non-contractual increases are – can be paid for. In last month’s discussion on the topic, you barely touched on the implications of this plan to the budget. That was another failing of this plan as originally proposed. Now, and even next month, is not the time to build in further encumbered costs to a budget that doesn’t yet even exist.
And yes, by all means, let’s try to attract better managerial talent. Competitive compensation is an important factor in accomplishing this, but more important is the talent we try to recruit.
In a day and age when officials such as Anthony Weiner, Mark Sanford, David Vitter and members of the United States Secret Service show us how not to conduct themselves in public service, surely we should be able to attract stronger and more qualified candidates to head our Departments than those who ended their last tenure with this City by exhibiting highly unprofessional and entirely inappropriate personal behavior, with a City colleague, on the office furniture in City Hall. We can, and must, be much more professional than that in our recruitment and hiring, regardless of compensation packages.
I thank you, Mr. President and your colleagues on Council for calling for a much-needed pause on this proposal. I, and the members of my Committee, sincerely hope you will use this opportunity to make this proposal a fair one for the current city employees involved and prospective recruits, as well as an equitable plan for the city’s finances and its taxpayers.
Be assured, we will support such a fair and equitable plan – one that provides only Cost-of-living adjustments, is considered as part of the approved Annual Budget, and which only goes forward from the date of adoption of that Budget, providing for no retroactive payments. We will oppose a plan that does not do these things.
Thank you.