That pay raise for the L.A. City Council? Ridiculous.

You’ve heard, no doubt, about the more than $5,000 pay raise awarded to members of the Legislature that kicked in Dec. 1, courtesy of the Citizens Compensation Commission and Proposition 112. But did you catch the fact that Los Angeles City Council salaries also went up?

Council member pay, previously the nation’s highest (by far) at $178,789, went up by another $2,503 on Dec. 3. When you do the math, you’ll see that it comes out to $181,292. That’s a 1.4% increase.

And by the way, the raise is retroactive to July 1. Los Angeles County supervisors get the same salaries, with the same raises.

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The city and state increases are unrelated to each other. Local government officials are not covered by Proposition 112, the ballot measure adopted by voters in 1990 to strip state lawmakers of the power to set their own salaries. Ending that blatant conflict of interest was a good move, even if it means take-home pay for politicians can go up regardless of their performance. The way to deal with bad performance is to vote lawmakers out of office.

The L.A. City Council also used to set its own pay, and that was also a conflict that voters dealt with by giving salary-setting power to someone else. At about the same time as the state salary reform, Los Angeles voters adopted a measure that established the city Ethics Commission and also pegged council pay to salaries earned by judges of the Los Angeles Municipal Court. That was the lower of two trial courts, handling misdemeanor cases instead of felonies and smaller civil cases instead of the big-money lawsuits. Municipal Court judges were paid significantly less than their Superior Court counterparts.

But in the 1990s, the two court systems merged, Municipal Court judges became Superior Court judges and got significant raises -- and those raises were also reaped, automatically, by City Council members. The controller, the city attorney and the mayor each get salaries that are based on council pay, plus an additional percentage.

So who sets judicial pay? Those salaries are adjusted under California Government Code Section 68203 (a) and are based on the average of the raises in negotiated labor agreements with state employees represented by labor unions. So if they get a contractual increase, as they did this year -- retroactive to July 1 -- so do the judges, which means so do the council members, the mayor, the city attorney, the controller and the county supervisors.

So if council members get the same pay as judges, and if judicial pay raises are based on state unionized employee raises, council members have a direct stake in the outcome of labor negotiations between state workers and the governor.

The Times’ editorial board has argued that there should be about twice as many City Council members, each making about half as much money -- an amount more in line with state lawmaker salaries, so there would be less incentive to “promote” to the council for any reason other than wanting to do the job.

In the case of state politicians, The Times was OK with the raises, in part because they were determined by an outside group and in part because that same group had recently dropped their pay precipitously.

But isn’t City Council pay also set by outside forces? Yes -- but at levels that were presumed to be quite lower, when there were still Municipal Court judges. Under the circumstances, with pay that is already too high, the additional 1.4% pay raise is ridiculous.

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