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Mayor Wu vetoes City Council pay raise proposal
The mayor is asking councilors to reconsider her proposal for 11 percent raises, rather than their amendment for 20 percent pay bumps.
Pay raises at city hall
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu vetoed a City Council amendment that would, if passed, give councilors and the mayor a pay raise of about 20 percent, Wu told councilors through a filing on Monday.
In a letter filed ahead of the council’s regular meeting this Wednesday, Wu returned the proposal and refiled her initial ask for a more modest raise of roughly 11 percent for the city’s top elected officials.
Among her reasons for vetoing the measure, Wu said pay raises for elected officials should more closely mirror those received by other public employees in the city.
When Wu’s administration took office last November, it faced an “unprecedented situation”: Every one of the city’s collective bargaining contracts had expired, the mayor wrote.
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Since then, the city has hammered out contracts for the “vast majority” of the city’s public workforce, Wu wrote.
“Like all workers, our elected officials should receive salary increases, but they should square with the increases that our frontline workers have received and are receiving in the contracts that we continue to settle,” Wu wrote. “Respectfully, I urge this Honorable Body to adopt our original recommendation.”
The council may now consider overriding Wu’s veto — and there is a good chance councilors could prevail over the mayor. A two-thirds majority would be required, and the council-filed amendment initially passed unanimously.
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Under the council’s proposal, 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 go into effect after the next election cycle, although some appointed positions could see their pay raise sooner, or rather, retroactively from Aug. 1.
The council voted to keep that 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.
As for other officials, Wu, in August, had initially proposed raising the mayor’s salary to $230,000 per year and councilors’ annual salaries to $115,000.
Those figures followed the Wu administration’s review of salary ranges for positions throughout the city, the findings of which were brought to the Compensation Advisory Board. The analysis determined Boston is 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.
Elected officials are among a select group of approximately 1,200 city workers who have their pay set by law, not union contracts.
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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 last week, in an interview on GBH’s “Boston Public Radio.”
Wu said 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.
The council’s amendment is simply “too high,” Wu said on GBH.
“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 workers 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].”
Read Mayor Wu’s full letter to the City Council:
Salary Disaproval by Christopher Gavin on Scribd
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