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June 4th, 2007 at 7:35 pm
On the other hand, the Mayor of Boston, a city of 559,000
and a budget of over 1-Billion dollars earns $175,000.
So does that mean Tom Menino is vastly underpaid? I don’t think so. I don’t believe you can make population and budget size the common denominator when hiring an administrator.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2006/05/04/council_oks_big_raises_for_itself_mayor/
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0763098.html
June 4th, 2007 at 11:28 pm
I would say yes, the Mayor of Boston is vastly underpaid.
If we think of city govt. as a business as so many of us would like for it to be managed, try and think of another billion dollar corporation that has CEO with a salary of $175K?
June 4th, 2007 at 11:52 pm
So you would have the CEO of Lowell make the same pay ratio between CEO and rank and file worker as well? According to one source (I’m not spending a lot of time looking) that ratio was 411 to 1 in 2005. So, do the calculation, what is Bernie worth if we base it on him being a CEO of a corporation instead of running a city?
BTW, corporations are responsible for earning shareholders money, so how would you structure the city so that we taxpayers, the shareholders, get annual dividends instead of having to pay taxes?
It’s a foolish argument to base pay on what someone else is making, you pay for performance and results, not because someone else is making more.
June 5th, 2007 at 7:27 am
It’s also foolish to expect the head of a billion dollar organization to make 175,000 bucks.
June 5th, 2007 at 9:14 am
But then the Governor’s salary is $160K, and that is a $27B organization. So, working back from that, the Lowell CM job is worth about $1,800 a year!
June 5th, 2007 at 7:27 pm
As I said, base a salary on performance and results, not because someone else is making more. Bernie is well compensated.
Using the 411 to 1 CEO to worker pay ratio, and assuming the average rank and file public sector employee in Lowell earns $30K, Bernie should be paid over $12-Million a year.
This city, any city, is not a company. While it’s executive officer can approach it with a professional businesslike attitude, a city is not and should not be run as a corporation and to try to link the two is not realistic. It makes for a nice bumper sticker, but it is not realistic.
What I would really like to see changed is the automatic pay raises in the form of the silly ordinance that requires a formal annual evaluation that links a favorable review to a pay raise.
If I recall, one of the big beefs the Cox crowd had with the CC is that councilors had given him a favorable formal review and payraise that went with it just a few months before forcing him out.