Borough Mayor pay raise postponed

PALMER — After voting to increase the salary of the Mat-Su Borough Mayor during the passage of the borough budget last week, reconsideration of Ordinance 20-040 was brought to the Assembly at their Tuesday meeting by Assemblyman Rob Yundt II. Yundt wrote that he voted incorrectly and wanted to collect more information on comparable pay for mayor’s.

The vote to increase the Mayor’s pay from $29,975 to $50,000 with an additional increase for benefits passed 4-3 with Assemblymen Tim Hale, Jesse Sumner and Assemblywoman Stephanie Nowers voting in opposition. Deputy Mayor Tam Boeve voted with Assemblymen George McKee, Mokie Tew and Yundt in support of the raise to the Mayor’s pay, which would have taken effect on July 1. Prior to the introduction of the reconsideration of 20-040, Mayor Vern Halter recused himself from the discussion.

“I move to postpone until such time as the board of salary and emoluments can meet and make a recommendation and I would speak to my reasoning. I was actually really thinking about this one and it’s kind of like Eugene [Haberman] says, you follow the public process because the public process done correctly is more likely to be in the public interest and really if you think about it, it actually is kind of true that we are the last people that should be arbitrarily setting the mayor’s salary,” said Sumner. “I do think we should allow that board to meet and to do their job and I think that they should also look at the school board’s travel reimbursement at the same time.”

The idea to send the ordinance to the board of emoluments is not a new one and was first proposed by Hale before he discovered that the board is inactive. Sumner questioned Borough Clerk Lonnie McKechnie about the length of time it would take to appoint members to the board of emoluments.

“We’d have to make sure to find people that would even want to participate on the board and then it takes at least one meeting to put them on the board so I can’t really tell you a time frame unfortunately,” said McKechnie.

Sumner amended his motion to postpone the ordinance until the August 17 meeting. McKee spoke in opposition to the motion to postpone, arguing that a Mayor should be responsible for marketing the borough.

“If you think you’re going to get this done by 29 August hey, I got a ferry I’d like to sell you ok. It’s not going to go. All of a sudden we’re interested in the public process, we haven’t been. Up to this very moment we’ve done what we damn well pleased and all of a sudden we’re concerned about the public? Look it is our responsibility to first of all, if we weren’t just giving the raise we were changing an ordinance and an emoluments committee cannot change the ordinance all they can do is recommend and we disregard recommendations all the time up here,” said McKee. “If we want to just coast along like we have been then let’s go ahead and fool around with this but I’m opposed to the postponement.”

The motion to postpone Ordinance 20-040 passed 5-1 with McKee voting in opposition.

“I did ask AML for a list of mayor salaries just on a cursory look if they are an administrative, a strong mayor they make $100,000 but there’s ceremonial mayors out there that make a lot less. Soldotna was one ithink $500 a months so I think it kind of is a good thing for us to have that information in front of us so we can make an informed decision, not just what we think ballpark is,” said Nowers.