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Democracy on the Front Lines
City Administrator’s Blog
Walter Denton
July 29, 2010
There has been a lot of media attention regarding the excessive salaries for the city manager ($787,637), assistant city manager ($376,288), and police chief ($457,000) in Bell, California. It certainly does not reflect well on the Bell City Council to allow such salaries, but it also has put all city managers in a defensive posture to justify public trust in local government. In fact, a special meeting of California city managers is being held this week to discuss how Bell’s exploits have tarnished citizens’ views of California city officials and local government.
The salaries in Bell are undoubtedly too high, but I don’t think they merit broad generalizations on local governments in general. In the LA Times article, the League of California Cities Executive Director Chris McKenzie said, "It would be really unfortunate if anyone took the outrageous action of one city and generalized it to all cities."* Salaries tend to be higher in California due to the higher cost of living, but not that high.
* Full Disclosure: I knew Chris McKenzie several years ago when he was the Executive Director for the League of Kansas Municipalities and I was working for the City of Wichita.
Public salaries are public information, and we get questions occasionally from residents and reporters inquiring about salaries. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch even has a database of selected organizations here. If you look on the database, you can see that my annual salary is listed at $110,590.61. You can argue whether that is a lot of money for a city administrator, but it is below the average for St. Louis metro city managers and administrators. Even so, I can assure you that no city manager salaries in the St. Louis metro area remotely approach $800,000.
Evaluating the salaries of public officials is important from a financial and political point of view, but such discussions can distract from other issues. The role of local government is to provide a safe and welcoming community for people to live, work, and play. Building and maintaining a world-class community requires excellent city services and quality professionals to manage those services. There is a market rate to hire quality managers and cities must pay the market rate if they want to hire good managers.
I agree that $800,000 is a ridiculous amount of money to pay a city manager, but I know many managers who work long hours to provide honest and open local governments with exceptional public services. If you divide their annual salary from the number of hours actually worked, I think citizens are getting a decent bargain.
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