The City Council’s Committee on Governmental Operations met Tuesday to hold a brief hearing on a bill that would raise the pay for New York City’s elected officials for the first time in 10 years.
The hearing comes after an effort to pass the five-figure pay bumps last year ran afoul of a City Charter provision prohibiting pay raises during a lame duck session.
Big Apple politicians have gone without a raise since 2016 — this despite a statutory requirement that the mayor empanel a commission to weigh in on pay raises every four years.
“Mayor de Blasio failed to empanel the required commission in 2020 — maybe because of the pandemic, who knows?” said Committee Chairperson Gale Brewer (D-Manhattan) “And Mayor Adams subsequently declined to convene one in 2024.
“This 10-year gap is the longest that city officials have gone without a raise in the 40 years since the commission framework has been in place,” she said.
If passed, the bill before the Council would give an 18.2% raise to Council members, the mayor, the comptroller and the public advocate, as well as the city’s borough presidents and district attorneys.
That would raise the mayor’s salary from $258,750 up to $305,800, the Council speaker’s salary from $164,500 to $194,400, and Council members’ pay from $148,500 up to $175,500.
Mayor Mamdani has previously indicated that he would not accept a raise during his first term.
That pay bump is in accordance with the recommendations of the three-member Quadrennial Advisory Commission, empaneled by Mamdani and Speaker Menin earlier this year.
“We came up with our 18.2% because that represents the increase in the cost of living since January 2022,” Commission Chairperson Carl Weisbrod told the Council.
“I should note that the actual cost of living since the last increase in 2016 has been significantly higher than that,” he added. “But we felt that all elected officials took office with the understanding of what their salaries would be in January 2022 and, as you know, we have gone through a period of intense inflation.”
The commission made several additional suggestions — including that, going forward, pay raises be timed to impact the pay of the incoming administration and Council rather than the ones voting on the raise.
The committee also suggested that an automatic 2% pay raise go into effect should a mayor decline to empanel an advisory committee.
That suggestion raised concern among good-government groups.
Grace Rauh, executive director of Citizens Union, testified Tuesday that she was worried a 2% backstop raise would “effectively eliminate the incentive to convene quadrennial advisory commissions in the future.”
“We’re concerned that eliminating the incentive to convene commissions would diminish an important mechanism for improving government,” she said.
Rachael Fauss at Reinvent Albany agreed. She warned that an automatic 2% raise without forming a commission would “effectively eliminate all public input regarding elected officials’ salaries.”