June 13, 2006
Know Your Lulus - and Other City Salary Debates
Gotham Gazette has a great feature on salaries for elected officials, as compensation for various officials will be re-assessed. For instance, did you know that public advocate and borough presidents get paid $150,000, plus have a car and driver, but don't have "real power over city policy?" And did you realize that serving on the City Council is a part-time job, so many members make a bit from their "real jobs"? And then there are the "lulus" - stipends City Council members get for heading certain positions or heading certain committees.
At any rate, there's debate over whether or not certain salaries should be raised. Queens City Councilman Tony Avella says the $90,000 base salary "is enough" while others argue officials spend a lot of time while serving the public. The salary debate will focus on the salaries for the office of mayor, comptroller, public advocate, borough president, district attorneys, and members of the City Council. NYC has the highest paid mayor in the country, with a salary of $195,000 (Mayor Bloomberg only takes a $1 salary), but the mayor is in charges of hundreds of thousands of city employees.
Gotham Gazette has a chart of the City Council's lulus, plus non-City Council income for certain members - City Councilman Domenic Rechhia pulls in $210,000 in outside income, plus $10,000 for heading the Cultural Affairs, Libraries & International Intergroup Relations Committee, which means an annual total income of $310,000.
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*NYC has the highest paid mayor in the country, with a salary of $195,000 (Mayor Bloomberg only takes a $1 salary).* He does take one dollar bcause he has to. The rest of the $194,999 is fed back into the city as revenue or a bloomberg annual donation to nyc.
since when city hall become corporate america?
"since when city hall become corporate america?"
sometime during the tammany era.
government = lucrative! duh! when you've got the laws and the guns, you can more or less do what you want for a long, long time.
You can't expect to incentivize people to enter public service without paying them. I'm pretty confident, also, that these public servants are required to live within NYC limits. First-year associates at the biggest NYC law firms make only $5K (sans bonus) less than a borough president. I don't find the salaries outrageous in the least.
There are many totally useless positions anyway. Let's face it: There is no need for public advocate and various other public officials. They exists only because politicians like to create bogus jobs for themselves.
However, there are couple of really important jobs in the city and I think they should be paid extemely well (mayor, deputy mayor, police commissioner, schools chancellor et cetera).
There is no reason why posts like public advocate or bourough president or even city council should make those kind of salaries. I sure do wish i can vote myself a raise. Come on, some of these positions have no real authority, lets clean this up.
Okay Lenny, tell us how to clean it up.
Conveniently, the big unions like police and fire got the residency requirement removed years ago. White collar civil servants like Assistant District Attorneys are vastly underpaid, not allowed to unionize, don't get overtime, and are required to live in the city - at least Bronx DA Rob Johnson requires his staff to live in the city. I don't think it is necessarily a city wide policy. Frankly, I don't see how a residency requirement can be legal but there it is.