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The Palo Alto City Council completed one of its fastest salary negotiations in recent history on Monday night, when it swiftly agreed to raise compensation for council members.
Following the recommendations of a new colleagues’ memo from Vice Mayor Greer Stone and Council member Ed Lauing, the council voted on Dec. 4 to revise the municipal code to increase council salaries from $1,000 to $1,600 per month. They also agreed to form a citizen committee to evaluate further salary increases beyond the $1,600 level and to approve a periodic cost of living adjustments for council members.
The vote specified that these adjustments would be approved on the council’s “consent calendar,” which is reserved for non-controversial items that get approved collectively with no debate.
Council member Greg Tanaka was the lone dissenter in the 6-1 vote to revise council salaries, a decision that members insisted was driven by a sense of civic duty and not personal benefit. Some argued that the demands of running a city like Palo Alto, which owns its own utilities, merits a higher pay.
“We’re just a different town because of the size of the budget, the size of the organization, the separate responsibilities that we have for water treatment plants and the whole ball of wax,” Lauing said.
More importantly, living in Palo Alto is expensive. Raising the salary of council members, he suggested, would allow a broader swath of residents to sign up for public service. The memo from him and Stone notes that historically, few lower-income workers have chosen to run for council.
“We welcome residents of all ethnicities and income levels,” the memo stated. “We also want our city council to represent the varied demographics we now have and the many new residents who will come to Palo Alto based on our initiatives to create hundreds of new affordable homes for lower income residents.”
The push for higher council salaries is partly driven by Senate Bill 329, legislation from Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa, that authorized cities to raise council salaries, with caps based on city sizes and ranging from $900 to $3,200 per month. A city of Palo Alto’s population (about 68,000) could have council salaries of up to $1,600 per month.
Because Palo Alto is a charter city, it could technically ignore these guidelines and set its salaries higher than this level. While the current city code links council salaries to state limits, council members have the option of revising this law and severing this link.
They suggested on Dec. 4 that they may do that — though not just yet. Their 6-1 vote authorizes a raise up to SB 329 levels, or from $1,000 to $1,600 per month. It also empowered the mayor to create a citizen committee that would evaluate whether the raises should be even higher. It tasked its Policy and Services Committee with figuring out what this group will look like.
The proposal to raise council members’ salaries proved broadly popular among its architects, who also happen to be its beneficiaries. Council member Julie Lythcott-Haims estimated that if a council member spends 20 hours per week on their city duties, the pay comes out to about $10 per hour. With such compensation, she argued, the Palo Alto council will continue to primarily consist of members who are retired and who don’t have to worry about where their income comes from.
She insisted that the effort to raise salaries is about future council members, not current ones.
“It’s not about us,” Lythcott-Haims said. “Most of us up here on the dais are in the position to do this. We are doing this. We’re managing somehow. It’s about who is not here.”
Council member Vicki Veenker acknowledged the awkwardness of council members talking about raising their own compensation levels but nevertheless supported the proposal from her colleagues to do so. While the memo included for comparison the salaries that Assembly members and mid-level staff members make ($122,694 and $162,229, respectively), Veenker argued that these comparisons aren’t particularly applicable because council members knew when they were deciding to run that this type of compensation would not be an option.
Tanaka, as the only dissenter, went further and called the council’s move “self-serving.” He rejected the effort by his colleagues to equate council members to other full-time employees when discussing compensation. He likened the council to a board of directors at a private company, leaders who get only a modest compensation but who see the success of the company as their main reward.
“One thing I kind of like about our city is that for the most part, we’re all part-time politicians. This is our hobby for us for the most part,” said Tanaka, who is terming out at the end of 2024 and who, as a result, would not be eligible for the raise. “We’re not doing it for the money. We do it because we care.”