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Council settles on city attorney's pay
by Jason Dietrich
After months of debate, the Redondo Beach City Council approved a pay raise of almost $2,000 per month for the city attorney, putting the position in the middle of the pack when compared with a sample of other Southern California city attorneys.
Cutting it to the calendar wire, the council raised the city attorney's base salary to $11,542 a month, or $138,500 a year, starting April 1, 2001 and included a 2.7 percent raise every April thereafter. Council members said the raise could spur more interest in the elected position and might bring forth a greater number of qualified candidates.
The ordinance passed 3-2, with council members John Parsons, District 5, and Bob Pinzler, District 4, dissenting.
Redondo Beach City Attorney Jerry Goddard currently pulls in a base salary of $9,634 a month and more than $1,150 a month in contributions to financial plans such as 401Ks and other forms of deferred compensation.
Goddard qualifies for those bonuses because of the decades he's spent working in government agencies. Newly elected city attorneys, who haven't racked up the same number of years of public service, wouldn't be able to cash in on those payments. If he is re-elected, Goddard could pull in more than $152,370 in the first year of his new term -- if his level of deferred compensation remains the same -- and more than $165,050 in his fourth year.
Goddard said the salaries paid by the city's legal department in recent years have not been competitive.
Parsons favored raising Goddard's base salary higher than 25 percent of the other city attorneys, but lower than the top 75 percent.
"I hate to put it this way," Parsons said. "But the reality is he has a compensation package. The reality is he's going to win reelection. The reality is he'd have a median level of compensation."
Councilman Gerard Bisignano, District 1, said that the purpose of deferred compensation was to reward public officials who had spent years in public service, not penalize them.
Salaries and raises for the elected department heads -- the city attorney, city treasurer and city clerk -- must be set before the opening of the period for candidates to file for the ballot. Raises for non-elected department heads are determined based on cost of living figures from the federal government. Elected department heads have been getting 5 percent raises annually to make up for a period in which their salaries were frozen to help deal with the city's past economic woes. Other employees and department heads had been getting much lower "cost of living" raises.
Mayor Greg Hill said the council was concerned with developing an even-handed approach to determining raises and salaries for department heads and establishing a process to make sure the pay scale keeps up with the times. In the future the council plans on basing pay raises for elected department heads on the cost of living, and annual raises will be set before the filing period begins. ER