Glasgow City Council members missed a great cost savings and leadership opportunity Monday when they voted 8 to 4 to reject councilman Tim Stutler’s proposed ordinance to reduce the council from 12 seats to nine and eventually seven positions in 2013.
This issue deserves a second reading and the support of the majority of the council. The first vote doesn’t bind the ordinance or doom it to failure unless discussion of the issue stops here. Passing the second reading is the essential step. For those who disagreed with the vote, as we did, there is an opportunity for your voice to be heard by the eight council members who opposed this ordinance.
Instead of leading by example and recognizing that improvements in communications and customer service technology make a council of 12, in our view, excessive and unwieldy, the council elected to preserve their positions and likely their health insurance benefits.
At a time when sacrifices are being made and difficult choices are certain to come in the next budget season, the council sends the wrong message to taxpayers during these challenging times.
Councilman Stutler’s well-considered ordinance was a move toward efficiency and cost cutting. He correctly points out that the council’s role is legislative not administrative and it’s a part-time job. In that part-time job the council members are elected to make policy; they shouldn’t be the first point of contact about barking dogs and potholes. Their service to taxpayers in this way is often commendable, but those citizens are asking them to deal with things that are beyond the role and authority of the council.
Councilman Stutler indicated the proposed ordinance would have shaved $45,000 average per year in the first wave then $75,000 average per year when complete. The 12 council members are each paid $8,615 year for their part-time role. In addition, they are eligible for city-funded health insurance where the city picks up 100 percent of the tab for city employees including council members and 65 percent for their families. That cost averages $7136 for each of the 12 council members but varies based on insurance coverage selected.
The city’s total annual cost of funding council compensation-related expenses is:
• $103,380 for council member salaries
• $85,643 for council member health and dental insurance
• $7920 for council member payroll taxes (FICA)
Simply cutting salaries for council members, as councilman Jim Marion mentioned at Monday’s council meeting, won’t yield the savings the five-seat reduction of the council would offer. The cost is also in the benefits and payroll taxes. Even by cutting salaries in half the move only roughly matches the savings for a three-seat reduction. It’s a largely symbolic move and one more easily undone. Simply cutting the compensation today does not assure that council compensation stays down when this issue blows over. Reducing the size of the council is a more enduring solution and better controls the escalating cost of benefits the council currently enjoys.
Using the 1.5 percent occupational tax revenue paid into the general operating fund to, among other things, cover council salaries and benefits, each seat requires the taxes of 27 Glasgow taxpayers earning $40,000 per year. The five seats the council seeks to preserve require the annual occupational tax contributions of 120 Glasgow taxpayers earning $40,000 per year.
We need to do better.
Unless the ordinance is re-submitted for second reading and voted into action, Glasgow remains as one of the six of Kentucky’s 207 Mayor-Council forms of government that have more than eight elected council members. And taxpayers pick up a $200,000 per year tab.
George Washington famously commented “My observation is that whenever one person is found adequate to the discharge of a duty it is worse executed by two persons, and scarcely done at all if three or more are employed therein.” The father of our country understood efficiency in leadership; the rest of us understand economic realities such as part-time jobs rarely rate full-time benefits and, when in the face of economic hardship, a dollar that is spent needs to be an essential and efficient dollar.
We hope that council members Armstrong, Ferrell, Groce, Isenberg, Marion, Neal, Scalise and Witcher will see their way to voting for something more substantive than a symbolic move. We need a more efficient and cost-cutting move like the Stutler ordinance to put the seven best, most effective council members in office and allow our city to join the other 97 percent of Kentucky cities that put efficiency and cost control first.
