Mayor Wu indicates she may veto the City Council’s proposed pay raises for city leaders

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu indicated Tuesday she may send back a proposal from the City Council to bump pay for some of the city’s top elected officials by about 20 percent after councilors unanimously supported the raise last week.

Wu, speaking on GBH’s “Boston Public Radio,” said she is considering vetoing the council’s measure, which is notably higher than the salary increases Wu first floated to the council in August.

The council’s version is simply “too high,” Wu said.

“My primary concern is that even our city workers, our first responders, our frontline workers who showed up every day at tremendous risk to themselves and their families during the pandemic, some of these works are now with an expired contract of two years, three years, or more. They have not gotten any adjustments even by contract,” Wu said. “So the timing of it is concerning to me and the scale of it [as well].”

Wu said on Tuesday her administration is still evaluating the financial impact of the council’s proposal. She has 15 days since the council vote to either approve or veto it. If she chooses the latter, the council can override Wu’s veto with a two-thirds vote or support from nine councilors.

Under the council’s proposal, which was approved by all 13 councilors, the mayor’s annual salary would jump from $207,000 to $250,000 while councilors would make $125,000 instead of the current salary of $103,500.

The raises would all go into effect after the next election cycle, though some appointed positions could see their pay raise sooner, or rather, retroactively from Aug. 1.

The 20 percent raise backed by the councilors was not Wu’s initial ask, however.

In August, Wu proposed raising the mayor’s salary to $230,000 per year and councilors’ annual salaries to $115,000.

Wu’s suggestion came after her administration reviewed salary ranges of positions throughout the city and brought the findings of the analysis to the Compensation Advisory Board. The reviewed determined Boston was behind its peers in Massachusetts and around the country when it comes to compensation at City Hall.

The board, in turn, offered a set of recommendations that Wu then put forward to the council for approval.

Wu provided some context for the move on Tuesday, highlighting how the vast majority of the city’s 19,000 employees have their pay determined through union contracts.

But a select 1,200 city workers, including elected officials, have their pay set by law, Wu noted.

Those employees have their salaries reviewed every two years, though that process was put off during the COVID-19 pandemic and those workers have not seen a raise since 2018.

Wu noted councilors cannot receive a pay raise until 2024 — after the next election — which means for six years, those positions have not seen or will not see salaries reviewed or increased.

Wu’s 11 percent raise proposal accounted for about a 2 percent raise for each of those six years, she said.

There is some agreement already between Wu and city councilors. The council voted to keep a portion of Wu’s initial proposal in place to give an immediate pay raise to officials in appointed positions, such as the chief of the city’s legal department and the fire and police commissioners.

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