Fascinating Scott Schwebke story in this morning's Standard-Examiner, reporting on an item on Tuesday night's Emerald City Council agenda, wherein, among other things, the Council will consider salary increases for elected municipal officials, themselves included. The headline of course focuses on what else? More Boss Godfrey show-boatin'; that's what:
• Ogden City Mayor Matthew Godfrey: No raise for meThis salary increase issue has been floating around for quite a while; you can read a couple of our previous articles on the subject here and here.
Mr. Schwbke reports this morning that council staff has been doing some serious research on the issue:
The proposed pay increase for mayor and the city council is tied to a survey comparing Ogden to five other cities that also have a council-mayor form of government, said City Council Chairwoman Caitlin K. Gochnour. Those cities are Sandy, Salt Lake City, Provo, Logan and Murray.Being the curious type, we immediately zeroed in on the council's online Meeting Agenda Packet in the hope of finding some info on these cross-city salary comparisons. Unfortunately we got no help there, inasmuch as the packet is entirely devoid of any of the tantalizing raw cross-comparison data.
Undeterred, we immediately navigated over to one of the most useful Utah databases on the web, utahsright.com, from which we spent about an hour cutting and pasting, in order to compile a "quick and dirty" salary comparison page of our very own:
• Comparable Salaries of Elected Officials in Utah Mayor-Council Form of Government CitiesCheck it out, O Gentle Ones!
Decide for yourselves whether the salaries of our hard-working Emerald City elected officials are due for a sharp increase.
We're short of time this morning, so we'll skip our own expansive editorializing on this. Having said that however, we will offer this pitch: Ogden City Council members put in full time effort for what's compensated as a nominally part-time job. If you compare the current proposed compensation for our own city council with councils of Sandy, Salt Lake and Murray, it's obvious to us that even under the current proposal, the Council will be selling itself short. Go for it, Ogden City Council! If you jack up your salaries to Salt Lake City levels, you can take our word for it... you won't hear a peep of a complaint from your WCF blogmeister.
As for Godfrey, who cares? If he won't take the extra 28 grand, he can donate it to a worthy project of his own choosing, no? We've heard Boss Godfrey's Velodrome Fund is accepting private donations and remains a mite short of funds.
We're posting this article on the fly... gotta go. But don't forget to lodge your own ever-savvy comments and observations.
