After years of stagnation, ordinance for raises on Thursday’s agenda
OCEAN CITY – After about 18 years of stagnation, Ocean City Council members will vote Thursday on basically doubling the salaries of the mayor and themselves and linking future annual increases to union contracts.
The ordinance is on the agenda at Thursday evening’s council meeting which begins at 6 p.m. in City Hall.
Currently, the mayor earns $20,600 and council members are paid $10,300, in an ordinance that set the salaries at the beginning of 2010. Salaries were raised to $20,000 and $10,000, respectively, at the start of 2006 after being set at $15,900 and $7,950 for 2005. There is an additional $1,000 stipend for council president and $500 for council vice president. The proposed ordinance does not include any stipends.
The new ordinance, No. 23-20, would raise the maximum base salary of the mayor to $40,000 and of council members to $20,000, effective Jan. 1, 2024.
On Monday, Council President Pete Madden said this has been discussed before and no action has been taken, but salaries for Ocean City’s elected officials have not kept pace with other communities.
“This is something that has been talked about, I think, since the benefits went away from council, which was back in 2008 or 2009,” Madden said. Under former Gov. Jon Corzine, officials elected after July 1, 2007, were not enrolled in the Public Employees Retirement System and they have not qualified for state health benefits since 2010.
“There’s never a right time to do it, but we’ve fallen so far behind a lot of other municipalities and it seems to come up year after year but we never take action, so we finally did.”
He added the current salaries have been in place for a long time.
“I don’t think anybody is in it for the money, but I think the disparity between the municipalities always comes up as a topic,” Madden said.
According to the ordinance, which is up for first reading Thursday, effective Jan. 1, 2025, and the first day of January of every subsequent year, the salaries shall increase by the same percentage as provided by collective bargaining agreements (“CBA”) between the city and city employees represented by the CWA, the Policemen’s Benevolent Association and the International Association of Firefighters. If those increases are not uniform across the board among the contracts, the increase in salary for mayor and council would “mirror the CBA with the lowest percentage increase.”
Madden said linking future increases to union contracts is a long-term objective.
“It is not to get stuck in this position again,” he said.
The mayor and council positions are part-time. The resort’s elected officials oversee a local government with 276 employees and a budget of just under $100 million in a community with more than $12.5 billion in ratables.
– By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff