By DONALD WITTKOWSKI
Members of City Council voted to give themselves a pay raise that will nearly double the salaries for them and Mayor Jay Gillian.
Beginning Jan. 1, 2024, the annual salary for the seven members of Ocean City’s governing body will increase to $20,000, while the mayor’s pay will jump to $40,000.
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.
Voting 6-0 at a meeting Thursday night, Council gave final approval to a salary ordinance that represents the first pay raise for them and the mayor since 2008.
“It’s very hard to give yourself a pay raise. It’s humbling, in a way,” Council Vice President Karen Bergman said.
Gillian briefly spoke about the pay raises, assuring members of the public in the audience that the city is careful about its spending and would not undertake any expense it could not afford.
“We don’t spend money haphazardly,” he said.
Pay raises for Council and the mayor would not be a one-shot deal. Starting in 2025, the Council members and mayor will receive automatic annual pay raises tied to the Consumer Price Index.
As the ordinance was originally proposed, the automatic annual raises for Council and the mayor would have increased by the same percentage as the labor union contracts between the city and municipal employees represented by the Communications Workers of America, the Policemen’s Benevolent Association and the International Association of Firefighters.
However, the Council members agreed to amend the ordinance Thursday night to instead link the raises to the Consumer Price Index to have an “objective index” to determine how much their salary – and the mayor’s – should increase each year.
“Now, your raises will be tied to an objective index,” City Solicitor Dorothy McCrosson told Council. “Even the appearance of a conflict of interest has been eliminated by this amendment.”
There had been questions whether tying the pay raises to union contracts approved by Council would have represented a conflict of interest. Under that scenario, the Council members would have been granting themselves annual pay raises at the same time they were voting on the union contracts.
Although some of the Council members expressed reservations about giving themselves a raise, they felt that a pay increase would be a fair thing to do for a job that carries a great deal of responsibility and personal sacrifices.
“I don’t do this for the money. But it does take a lot of time,” Bergman said.
Councilmen Terry Crowley Jr. and Jody Levchuk indicated that a higher salary would be an incentive for other people to run for Council in the future. Crowley also said that a vote now will take the “burden” away from future Council members to have to approve pay raises.
The 6-0 vote did not include Councilman Tom Rotondi, who was absent from the meeting.
Dave Winslow, who joined Council on Aug. 10 as its newest member, said he conducted extensive independent research to see whether the pay raises would be warranted.
“The numbers can be justified,” he concluded.
Winslow, a retired human relations executive, said he studied pay data from the Consumer Price Index and the Social Security program to back up his research. He also said that he wanted to independently verify an analysis done by City Business Administrator George Savastano that supported the pay raises.
Savastano said he conducted thorough research of the salaries of elected officials in the surrounding region in comparison with the higher pay 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,” Savastano said in comments during the Aug. 10 Council meeting.
Savastano maintained that the current salaries are not commensurate with the level of responsibility each one of Ocean City’s elected officials has while overseeing a local government that includes a $99 million annual operating budget, 276 full-time employees and 1,000 seasonal workers.
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.
“You guys absolutely deserve a raise. There’s no question about it all,” resident Bill Hartranft said while agreeing that future pay hikes should be tied to the Consumer Price Index.
Resident Dave Hayes, who is a retired executive in the aerospace and IT industries, said that he learned during his career that “if you want to attract good talent, you have to pay for it.”
Marie Hayes joined her husband in supporting the pay raises. She said the town should be able to afford the raises without any difficulty.
“Ocean City is not a poor town,” she said. “So, I think we can easily budget for these small increases in salaries.”
Residents Susan Cracovaner and Donna Moore, though, urged Council to table the salary ordinance so that the issue could be discussed and analyzed at more length. But Council did not consider delaying the vote.
Council President Pete Madden stressed that there had been great deal of discussion on the ordinance during the past two weeks leading up to the meeting.
“This didn’t go without any thoughtful consideration,” Madden said.
