ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, May 15, 1996 TAG: 9605150046
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
OK, SO THE PAY raises that Roanoke City Council awarded itself on Monday, to go into effect July 1, don't rank with the double-pension flap of a few years ago as a major-league scandal.
Nor did council this year repeat last year's mistake of awarding percentage raises to top managers that are substantially more generous than the average for all city employees (up to 7.8 percent for appointed officers, compared to an average 4.7 percent for city workers).
Nevertheless, the procedure by which council upped its own pay this week is nothing short of disgraceful. If they are capable of shame, council members ought to reverse their vote and debate the matter again, this time in the open.
Our two principal objections:
Council shouldn't have gone behind closed doors to discuss the issue.
"It's a salary matter," Vice Mayor William White said. "It's just like [we] don't discuss salaries of council-appointed officers in public."
Sorry Vice Mayor, it's a legal matter. Virginia courts and attorneys general have held that the salary exemption in the commonwealth's Freedom of Information Act applies only to specific, identifiable individuals - not broader discussions of salary raises affecting groups of people.
The point of the exemption is to protect the privacy of individual employees, not to prevent open discussion of the politics of mayoral and council salaries - or, for that matter, discussion of across-the-board raises for appointees.
Council was talking about its own pay, for heaven's sake, not evaluating the performance of an employee. Using the Freedom of Information exemption to keep the discussion out of the public's hearing was as illegal as it was outrageous.
Council shouldn't have waited until after last week's municipal elections before putting the subject on the table.
This criticism is partly mitigated by the fact that three current members of council are voluntarily leaving office: Their last day is June 30, so they will not benefit from the raise they voted on. Granted, too, council was under no legal obligation to propose the raises prior to the election.
But four current members will benefit from the raises they voted themselves. The four include two - Mayor David Bowers and Councilwoman Linda Wyatt - who won re-election eight days ago. Why not, as a matter of principle, let the voters know beforehand that the pay for the posts sought by the candidates was going to change?
The raises themselves, for the council members, may be defensible. People don't run for council to get rich; under the new salary scale, they still won't.
The mayor's pay will rise from $15,000 to $18,000 annually. The salary for the six other part-time council members will rise from $13,000 to $14,000. While those increases - 20 percent for the mayor, 7.7 percent for others on council - may look huge at first glance, this is the first raise for the mayor since 1987 and the first for the others since 1990. On an annual basis, the raises are little more than 2 percent, and the new salaries will remain well below the adjusted state ceiling that goes into effect July 1.
The salary increases for top city administrators seem less defensible. City Attorney Wilburn Dibling's increase from $98,000 to $102,500 hardly looks justifiable in light of council's plainly misguided view of the open-meetings law.
The problem, though, is not the pay. It's the procedure. Mac McCadden, retiring soon from council, deserves credit for his lone vote against this travesty.
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