Job or passion? Plan to raise City Council salaries splits members

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Members of the Palo Alto City Council broadly agree that their city, while exemplary in some ways, has fallen woefully behind in one area: council members’ compensation.

And they’re eager to do something about that.

Responding to a recent directive from the full council, the council’s Policy and Services Committee backed on Feb. 13 a new policy that would give each council member a pool of funds in addition to their $1,000 monthly salaries that they can use for personal technology, constituent services and stipends support staff. The three members — Chair Lydia Kou, Council member Julie Lythcott-Haims and Council member Greg Tanaka — all agreed that council members should be only spending so much of their own money on city business.

Lythcott-Haims and Tanaka were particularly enthusiastic about the new program, with both supporting going well beyond the $2,000 per year that the full council had recommended they receive last year. Tanaka suggested that Palo Alto create a program similar to that of Mountain View, where each council member gets more than $12,000 annually to pay for technology, phone bills and other expenses associated with serving.

Lythcott-Haims and Tanaka both said that they have been spending their personal money to pay for services that they need to be effective in their jobs. For Tanaka, this includes cell phone bills and the Zoom account that he uses to talk to constituents and host his Sunday office hours.

“The community wants us to be accessible and involved,” Tanaka said. “For years, I’ve just been paying out of pocket for all these expenses, and it’s way past $2,000 a year.”

Lythcott-Haims lamented that a city of Palo Alto’s prominence offers its elected leaders too little compensation, such that serving may actually cost them money.

“I just think we do a little wink-wink-nudge-nudge about the City Council sometimes in this city,” Lythcott-Haims said. “We’re a billion-dollar city. We have seven people who make $5 an hour who do the work of the city and we have to pay our own expenses out of pocket.”

The exact amount of the stipend is yet to be determined. While both Tanaka and Lythcott-Haims advocated for effectively adopting Mountain View’s policy, they backtracked after City Attorney Molly Stump and City Manager Ed Shikada said they would like to review and advise the council about any such policy. Kou also said she was uncomfortable with simply adopting Mountain View’s relatively high stipends without also looking at what other cities in the area are doing.

Ultimately, the committee directed staff by a 3-0 vote to return next month with comparisons from other cities. When Stump noted that this would leave staff with about two weeks to do the needed analysis because the city has a policy of posting information for upcoming meetings 11 days in advance, Lythcott-Haims suggested that the city has “wiggle room” when it comes to notification because it is legally obligated to public release its council packet three days before a meeting.

The committee’s discussion of expense accounts comes two months after the council took another action with material benefits for council members. Emboldened by Senate Bill 329, a law that allows local jurisdictions to increase salaries for elected officials, the City Council agreed in December to raise members’ monthly salaries from their current levels of $1,000 to $1,600, the amount allowed under the new legislation for cities of Palo Alto’s size.

The council also agreed at that time to establish a committee to evaluate further salary increases for council members, a change that would have to be approved by voters. Even though Palo Alto, as a charter city, is not obligated to follow the state limit on council salaries, the city’s current law ties it to the state limit and would need to be revised during a council election year.

The Policy and Services Committee advanced this effort on Tuesday when it approved the parameters of this committee. Under the committee’s motion, the new citizens group would consist of 15 members who would be selected through an application process. It would have 12 months to issue a recommendation to the council on whether compensation should be increased above the newly adopted level of $1,600 per month and, if so, how high it should be.

The discussion showed a sharp split on the topic among committee members. Lythcott-Haims initially favored a much smaller committee of three to five people, with preference for former city managers and human resources professionals. Once she and her colleagues agreed to expand the number of seats, she argued that the new group should be “broadly representative of the Palo Alto community” when it comes to socioeconomic status.

Tanaka, the only council member who voted against the salary increase last December, lobbied for 15 members and argued that the group should be as inclusive as possible. Kou was somewhere in between and suggested a group of five to seven members would be reasonable. Ultimately, the committee’s recommendation for a citizen committee advanced by a 2-1 vote, with Tanaka dissenting.

The committee also splintered over a more fundamental question: Are the salary raises even worth pursuing?  

For Lythcott-Haims, the answer was a resounding yes. She argued that a salary hike would encourage more participation from people in lower income levels. People who work multiple jobs or have no flexibility when it comes to work schedules would find it nearly impossible to serve on council without higher compensation, she said.

“I don’t want our city to be governed by the wealthy who have enough money in the bank such that their mortgage is paid for, their bills are paid for, their luxuries are paid for and they can afford to put in 30 to 40 hours per week to the city because their financial circumstance is so flush,” she said. “I just think the city misses out on the best possible governance if only people with that level of financial means can serve.”

Even so, Lythcott-Haims observed that Palo Alto Mayor Greer Stone is a teacher and a renter — hardly an exemplar of the type of gentry class that she had described. “I don’t know how he does it,” she said during the discussion.

Kou, who is a realtor, and Tanaka, a tech entrepreneur, also pushed back against how she framed the issue, with each maintaining that they are not “rich” and are not serving on the council for compensation. Though both voted to create the committee, consistent with direction from the City Council, both said they will not support salary increases for council members.

Tanaka said he views serving on the council as a “volunteer position.” He also said that he had been volunteering in his communities for most of his life and considers his service as a “passion project” rather than a job.

“I’m not doing this for the money,” said Tanaka, who was also the sole council member to vote against raising salaries in December. “I’m doing this because I live here and I want to have a great life here and I want to make it better.

Kou similarly said that she views her time on the council as a “public service” and that she has no problem with the current system.

“I didn’t come in here for compensation,” Kou said. “It’s never been part of what I had wanted.”