By DONALD WITTKOWSKI
Members of City Council and Mayor Jay Gillian are in line for a pay raise that will nearly double their salaries.
Council introduced an ordinance at Thursday night’s meeting that would increase the annual salary for the seven members of Ocean City’s governing body to $20,000 and would hike the mayor’s pay to $40,000.
The higher salaries are scheduled to take effect Jan. 1, 2024, if the ordinance is given final approval following a public hearing at the Aug. 24 Council meeting.
The proposal was generally met with support from Ocean City residents who spoke during Thursday’s meeting, although Councilman Jody Levchuk acknowledged he was worried that it might provoke the opposite reaction.
“I was a little nervous that it could go badly and we were going to be pooh-poohed about it,” Levchuk said.
Pay raises for Council and the mayor would not be a one-shot deal. Starting in 2025, the Council members and mayor would receive automatic annual pay raises tied to the wage hikes in the labor contracts for the city’s municipal employees.
According to the ordinance, the Council and mayor’s salaries would increase by the same percentage as the collective bargaining agreements between the city and municipal employees represented by the Communications Workers of America, the Policemen’s Benevolent Association and the International Association of Firefighters.
In the event pay hikes are not uniform across the board among those labor contracts, the salary increase for the mayor and Council would mirror the union agreement that has the lowest percentage increase, the ordinance says.
Currently, the mayor earns $20,600 annually and the Council members are paid $10,300. The Council president is given an extra $1,000 and the vice president $500.
Council voted 6-0 to introduce the ordinance proposing the pay raises. Councilman Dave Winslow, who was appointed as the seventh member of the governing body Thursday, abstained from voting.
Winslow will represent the city’s Fourth Ward in place of former Councilman Bob Barr, who resigned this month to take a seat on the Cape May County Board of Commissioners. Winslow said he wasn’t even aware that Council members are paid a salary.
Some of the Council members expressed reservations about giving themselves a raise, but felt that a pay increase would be a fair thing to do for a job that carries a great deal of responsibility and requires a lot of personal sacrifices.
“We do this because we love the city,” Council Vice President Karen Bergman said in remarks echoed by other Council members.
Levchuk said he believes a pay increase is “very defensible” for the amount of time and commitment the Council members invest in their jobs. He also said the higher salaries would be an incentive for other people to run for Council in the future.
Before Council voted to introduce the ordinance, City Business Administrator George Savastano spoke at length in support of raising the salaries. He said the salaries for Ocean City’s mayor and Council have not been changed since 2008.
Savastano maintained that the current salaries are not commensurate with the level of responsibility that the mayor and Council members have in a town with an annual budget of $99 million, 276 full-time employees and 1,000 seasonal workers.
“To a large degree, this is really an ideological question: Should our elected officials be provided more than just nominal compensation? Should they be fairly compensated to the degree that we can determine what amount can be considered fair? The fact is, the current salaries are not commensurate with the level of responsibility and commitment that goes with the position,” he said.
Savastano said he conducted extensive research of the salaries of elected officials in the surrounding region in comparison with the higher pay proposed for Ocean City’s mayor and Council members.
“I can tell you that the proposed salaries are not out of line with those that are paid to elected officials of other communities in our region,” he said. “If this ordinance is enacted, the salaries will be higher than some and lower than others.”
Salary hikes for the mayor and Council would have only a slight impact on local tax rates, Savastano explained. For the owner of a home assessed at $1 million, there would be an added cost of $7 annually in local taxes, or just about 2 cents per day, he said.
During public comments at the meeting, residents largely indicated they were in favor of raising the mayor and Council salaries to fairly compensate the city’s elected officials for their duties.
“I think, really, it’s about time. I appreciate the job you do,” resident Frank Worrell told Council.
Another resident, Chuck Deal, said he believes the mayor and Council members deserve a raise, but he asserted that the automatic annual increases proposed starting in 2025 should be tied to the Consumer Price Index, not the pay hikes in the union contracts.
Deal asserted that since the Council members approve the union contracts, they are, in effect, also approving annual pay raises for themselves. He believes that would be a conflict of interest.
Brian McPeak, another resident, said he thinks Council deserves a raise, but he also believes that the process for approving the pay increases is “flawed.”
McPeak suggested it would be unethical for members of Council to give themselves a raise. He said they are making themselves a “direct beneficiary” when they approve the pay increases in the union contracts.
Instead of having the pay raises take effect on Jan. 1, 2024, McPeak urged Council to revise the salary ordinance to make it effective after the next Council election in May 2024.
