Valley council salaries make 2005 ballot

Spokane Valley residents will vote on whether their City Council deserves a salary increase – but the issue won’t be on the ballot until November 2005.

The Spokane County Auditor’s Office verified Thursday that petitioners collected enough valid signatures to put the salary increase to a vote.

“These were some of the cleanest petitions we’ve seen,” Auditor Vicky Dalton said.

The office verified 6,421 signatures, or about 85 percent of the total checked. Dalton said she usually sees a 67 to 70 percent accuracy rate.

Petitioners needed 6,372 signatures to qualify for the ballot, a more conservative number than was previously published because there were some questions about how many signatures were required, she said. Dalton said she wanted to “err on the side of caution.”

More signatures might have been valid, but the staff stopped counting after it had more than enough to qualify, she said.

Petitioners had expected to put the issue on this November’s ballot, but because the petition deadline coincided with the September primary, the auditor’s office didn’t have time to verify the signatures before the filing deadline. Salary issues must be decided during general elections, which explains the delay until next November.

“It was a disappointment that they didn’t get them done by this election, but we accomplished what we wanted to,” said Sally Jackson, who organized the petition. “We prevented that pay raise until it can be voted on a year from now.”

Jackson’s next move is to organize a disincorporation campaign. She said people call her every day wanting to dissolve the new city, and she plans to start circulating petitions in January.

If those petitioners gather the 21,000 signatures needed to put that issue on a ballot and voters decide to disincorporate, the salary issue “might be moot,” Jackson said.

In the meantime, council members will continue to earn $400 a month. The mayor earns $500.

An independent salary commission determined this summer that – based on the amount of work the elected officials do for the city, the time they put into their roles and the salaries council members make in other Washington cities similar in size to Spokane Valley – their pay should range from $900 to $1,200 instead.

The commission’s decision would have taken effect automatically if citizens hadn’t petitioned it.

If voters OK the salary increase, it will cost the city a total of $47,000 more a year. That’s less than two-tenths of 1 percent of the city’s general fund.

The cost of putting the issue on the ballot will be minimal, Dalton said, because the city already will have to pay for a ballot since all the council seats will be up for election next year. The cost of verifying the signatures won’t be known until the September payroll is done, but it took 100 hours of staff time, 22 of which were overtime hours, she said.

The council could have voted for a salary hike itself, without going through the salary commission, but taking that route would have delayed the pay increase until after the next council election anyway. Mayor Mike DeVleming said the council never considered making that decision without the commission.

DeVleming avoided answering whether he personally felt that council members deserved a raise, but said he thought establishing a salary commission to make the decision was the best way to get a thoughtful, citizen response to that question.

“They performed the public process, had the public meetings, advertised, did the research,” he said. “They discussed this a lot with friends and neighbors to get some input.”

At a recent council meeting, Planning Commission Chairman Bill Gothmann did his part to help the council get its raise. During the public comment period, he handed Finance Director Ken Thompson 50 cents from his pocket to cover what he estimated to be his share of the added cost of the pay increase.

Gothmann said that current salary scale was meant to be temporary. It’s the minimum allowed under state law.

“Advocates of freezing the salaries are advocating that council members be paid $2.49 per hour,” Gothmann later wrote in an e-mail message to a reporter. “This is disgraceful.”