After 3-2 Council Vote : OK for Burbank Raises Worries Council Minority

Burbank City Council members all said the city needed to bring the salaries of its department heads in line with those of officials in other cities. But they continued to disagree Wednesday over whether a plan they adopted, including 15% raises for some department heads, was the right way to tackle the problem.

Mayor Mary Lou Howard, although acknowledging that the officials’ salaries were below average, maintained that Burbank should not have attempted to play “catch-up” with the other cities because of the cost to taxpayers. But Councilman Michael Hastings said the raises were long overdue and necessary to prevent discontent among top city officials.

“The bottom line is, if executives in the private sector are neglected and ignored for five years, you can’t tell them, ‘Forget it.’ ” Hastings said. “In cities, if you want good leadership, you have to pay for it. Neglect leads to discontent, which leads to bad service.”

The raises, approved on a 3-2 vote late Tuesday night, were prompted by a survey that found salaries of the top Burbank officials were as much as 26% lower than those of their counterparts in Glendale, Pasadena, Torrance, Inglewood and Santa Monica.

Five department heads were given the 15% raises and seven others were given raises ranging from 5% to 5.8%.

The council had debated for several weeks whether to raise the pay of the department heads all at once or to phase in the increases to bring the salaries in line with those in the other cities.

Although most council members at first favored a “one-shot” solution, they backed down after City Manager Robert (Bud) Ovrom said that plan would cost the city more than $217,000 this year.

As a compromise, the council voted to give the 15% raises to the five department heads shown by the survey to have the most out-of-line salaries, and to give lower raises to the other officials.

The revised package will cost the city $111,585, Ovrom said.

Ovrom said the raises still will not make the Burbank officials’ pay equal to that in the other cities. “Across the board, we’re still below everyone else,” he said. “But it’s a step in the right direction.”

Receiving the 15% raises were Library Director Marcia Richards, whose annual salary will be $47,472; Police Chief Glen Bell, who will earn $65,568; Fire Chief Curtis Reynolds, who will make $64,392; Public Works Director Steven Magnuson, who will earn $66,036 and Information Systems Director C. E. Dettmann, whose new salary will be $54,300.

Will Get Fringe Benefits

The city will also give each management employee what Ovrom called a “cafeteria fringe-benefit plan” worth $6,313 a year and allowing officials to choose the benefits the city will provide them.

The two council members who voted against the raises, Howard and Al Dossin, argued that the increases were excessive.

“We would all like our department heads to be at the average, but when the private sector is not getting the same kind of increase, I don’t think a city government should,” Howard said. “After all, the taxpayers who are working in the private sector are not getting that increase, and our first obligation is to them.”