Vote Thursday on doubling mayor, council pay
OCEAN CITY – The raises that will double the salaries for the mayor and council member positions comes up for a public hearing and second reading at the Ocean City Council meeting Thursday evening.
On Aug. 10, council voted 6-0 to approve the ordinance, which will set the mayor’s salary at $40,000 and the council members’ salaries at $20,000.
Currently, the mayor earns $20,600 and council members are paid $10,300. Those salaries were set at the beginning of 2010. Salaries were raised to $20,000 and $10,000, respectively, at the start of 2006 after being $15,900 and $7,950 for 2005. There is an additional $1,000 stipend for council president and $500 for council vice president, but the new ordinance does not include any stipends.
The meeting begins at 6 p.m. in City Hall Council Chambers.
If approved on second reading, the new salaries would take effect Jan. 1, 2024.
In the future, annual increases would be tied to union contracts.
According to the ordinance, 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.”
Ocean City Business Administrator George Savastano spoke in favor of the ordinance, in part mirroring what Mayor Jay Gillian and Council President Pete Madden told the Ocean City Sentinel in an earlier interview. They pointed out that elected city officials are not compensated in line with that of other communities or in line with their responsibilities, which include overseeing a budget of nearly $100 million and a city government with 276 year-round employees and nearly four times that of part-time employees during the summer months.
During public comment at the last council meeting, citizen Charles Deal said although he agreed with raising the salaries, they should have mirrored the Consumer Price Index over the years since the last raise. That would have increased them by about 34 percent, rather than the nearly 100 percent in the new ordinance.
By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff
