Voters to decide on council raises

Jeffrey Libby

Monday, April 2, 2001 | 11:35 a.m.

Boulder City councilmen in recent weeks have taken to reciting in detail the long hours they work for the city to take home a $22,000 annual paycheck.

One by one, they click on their microphones at the close of city business Tuesday nights and put off going home a little longer. Councilman Joe Hardy, for example, spent eight minutes at the close of Tuesday's meeting recounting his recent testimony before the city health board.

Even the mayor, who earns slightly more at $24,600, has taken to letting his constituents in council chambers and in the television audience know how conscientiously he has been working -- practically full time for part-time wages.

As the controversy over City Council midterm salary raises approved in June has heated to the point of pitting neighbor against neighbor, each of the council members has taken a stab at the violin solo. Except Councilman Bill Smith.

Smith says the hard work is beside the point. He hopes voters will agree when they go to the polls Tuesday to vote on his referendum, which would repeal the raises.

Councilmen voted in June to add $5,000 a year to their salaries. The mayor would get an $8,000 raise. The council as a whole has not voted itself a raise since 1991, receiving annual cost-of-living increases during that time.

Since 1970 the City Council has approved four raises. On each occasion council members did not earn raises until they were re-elected. At the state level, midterm raises are illegal.

That precedent, said Smith, who is not seeking a second term, should make clear the unethical nature of the midterm raises approved by the current council.

"It's never been done before in the state of Nevada," Smith said at a recent meeting.

But even if the raises constitute a departure from precedent, City Attorney Dave Olsen said, the city charter clearly states that raises go into effect after an election -- so the council could interpret that to mean all raises, whether or not council members had run.

"I told the council you have to take the legal, not the political, approach and do what the charter says," Olsen said. "If you want the raise, have some guts and go with what the charter says."

Councilman Bryan Nix, who stands to benefit from the same-term raises if voters uphold them, has gone so far as to take out an ad in the local weekly newspaper suggesting that even with the new raise, his city wages would break down to $9.85 an hour.

His ad was paid for by an ad-hoc group, the Boulder Defense League, which has received much of its money from longtime County Commissioner Bruce Woodbury and from Sempra Energy, a California-based energy conglomerate that opened an electric-generating plant in the Eldorado Valley just more than a year ago.