A city director thinks a citizens committee to review the salaries of top Little Rock officials and make pay recommendations to the city board would be a good idea.
Ward 4 City Director Brad Cazort announced the idea last week and said he plans to speak with the city attorney soon to draft an ordinance to be voted on by the Board of Directors.
"Conceptually, I don't have this fleshed out completely. I'm assuming something along the lines of every board member appointing one citizen and the mayor appointing three so you have an odd number," Cazort said by phone. "They would convene and study the issue of appropriate salaries."
Cazort said he came up with the idea after reviewing the lists of all city and state employees' salaries that the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette compiles yearly on the "Right 2 Know" portion of its website.
The lists are searchable by highest salary.
City Manager Bruce Moore ranks fifth on the list of the highest salaries in Little Rock. His annual pay is $181,896, not including benefits. That's behind the chief executive officers of Little Rock Wastewater, Central Arkansas Water, and Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport/Adams Field, and the chief operating officer at Central Arkansas Water.
"The pay ought to be appropriate to the degree of difficulty and duties encompassed in the job, and the city manager's job, I think, is by far the most difficult and demanding job anywhere in the city and probably needs to be compensated as such," Cazort said.
The city board doesn't have control over salaries at the wastewater and water utilities or the airport, which are quasi-independent agencies.
Cazort envisions the committee reviewing pay of the city manager, mayor and city board. He hopes to propose an ordinance by March to authorize the committee, and he then envisions the committee taking a month or two to do its research, he said.
Mayor Mark Stodola makes $160,000 a year -- ranking eighth on the list of highest salaries in Little Rock. Board members are paid $18,000 annually with a monthly office allowance of $250. They also get their business travel costs reimbursed when attending conferences.
In comparison, North Little Rock Mayor Joe Smith makes $103,486 a year, second behind the city attorney in North Little Rock's ranking of its highest-paid officials. North Little Rock doesn't have a city manager. Its aldermen are paid $10,300 annually with a $250 monthly allowance.
The state used a citizens committee last year to determine salaries for prosecuting attorneys, circuit judges, state prosecutors, lawmakers, the governor, the attorney general, the secretary of state, the treasurer, the state auditor, the land commissioner, Supreme Court justices, Court of Appeals judges and state district judges.
That process inspired Cazort's plan to set up such a committee to review city pay, he said.
Gene Fortson, city director at-large, said he is interested in getting more details about how the committee would work. His initial thoughts were that the idea "has some merit," he said.
"I haven't had time to absorb it, but I think it has some merit depending on the composition of the group and how the system is structured," Fortson said. "I think there needs to be some input on public officials' salaries from people other than just the public officials themselves."
The city manager's salary is determined by the city board after yearly evaluations. The power to set officials' salaries would still lie with the board if an advisory committee were set up.
The last time the city board reviewed the mayor's salary was in 2013. A state statute requires a full-time mayor operating under a mayor-city manager form of government to be paid a "comparable" salary to that of other municipal employees with similar responsibilities.
The board spent months that year determining what comparable pay would be. An ordinance to raise the mayor's pay to be equal to that of the city manager's -- which at the time was $179,208 -- was postponed several times and then eventually dropped at the request of the mayor.
Stodola told city directors that the issue had been "too divisive." Cazort was the city director who proposed that ordinance.
At the time, Joan Adcock, city director at-large, advocated for a special committee of board members and community members to be formed to review how salaries of top officials are determined and to define the roles of the mayor and city manager more clearly.
In regard to Cazort's proposal, Adcock said she's not in favor of it. Right now the board hires only two people -- the city manager and the city attorney. The board does annual reviews to determine the pay for those positions. The mayor's position is elected.
"I see no purpose in [a committee], because we only hire those two people. As far as I'm concerned, those are the only two people we should have any discussion on and any research on their salaries. If anyone wants to research that privately and bring that information to the evaluations, that's fine. I've never seen anything where we set the mayor's salary. As far as our pay, we just recently have increased that," Adcock said.
Stodola's salary was set by city ordinance in 2007 after voters in a special election authorized a full-time mayor with veto and appointment powers.
"Right now, we are supposed to be concentrating on infrastructure and the 10-year-plan for that. I don't think we need to be adding other things to the budget until we fulfill that commitment to the people," Adcock said.
Metro on 01/25/2016