Bradley Will Refuse Raise if It’s Tied to Ethics Reform

Mayor Tom Bradley said Monday that he will not accept a pay raise if it is tied to an ethics reform package under consideration by the Los Angeles City Council.

Instead, Bradley would donate his $9,467 raise to charity, he said in a letter to the council.

The council is scheduled to take up the ethics and pay raise issues today for a final time before placing the measures on the June ballot.

Some opponents of the ethics reforms have said privately that they believe linking the reforms with the pay raises may kill the reforms altogether because the public will vote down the pay raise. Under the proposal, council members would receive 40% pay raises, boosting their salaries to $86,157, and the mayor would get a 9.2% raise, making his salary $112,004.

“I strongly urge you to allow the voters to speak separately on these topics,” Bradley said in the letter.

Bradley did not say whether he would turn down the pay raise if it is placed on a separate ballot measure and approved by the voters.

Through a flurry of amendments last month, the council altered a package of ethics proposals drawn up by a citizens commission appointed by Bradley one day after his narrow election victory last spring.

The council killed a proposal on Jan. 19 to establish public financing of political campaigns, upsetting an agreement worked out between Councilman Michael Woo and Geoffrey Cowan, the head of Bradley’s ethics commission. At the same time, council members approved a ballot measure giving themselves, the mayor, the city attorney and the controller pay raises.

The commission had drawn up a broad ethics package that called for public financing, a ban on outside income for public officials and a prohibition on lobbying by public officials for a year after they leave office. Cowan said he would call for a citizens initiative if the council failed to pass an ethics package that included the commission’s major proposals.

Woo has spent the past three weeks working to put the compromise back together and, according to sources, has garnered enough council support to revive the public financing measure.

However, the new compromise would put many of the Cowan commission’s ethics reforms and a pay raise for council members together on the same ballot measure, according to sources.

Linking the ethics and pay raise proposals is meant to be an incentive to win the votes of some council members who oppose public financing, the sources said.