Pasadena Looks for a New Method of Raising Pay for Officials : Politics: Embattled City Council may form a panel to draft a ballot measure calling for a salary increase.

The Pasadena City Council has not given up on a pay raise, despite its recent vote to reverse a new, sixfold salary increase that touched off heated public debate.

Now the council appears ready to create a commission to draw up a ballot measure to raise the council pay from the current $500 monthly maximum.

The idea was proposed by former Mayor William Bogaard and four others in a letter to council members. The council, already under fire for adopting the raise to $3,200 a month through a legal loophole and without public comment, decided last month to schedule a hearing for Tuesday to discuss creating the commission.

“I think the citizens would go for $1,500,” Mayor Jess Hughston said. “But not in the near future. The feelings are going to have to subside for a while.”

Hughston, whose vote had been crucial for the 4-3 pay-raise approval, paved the way for the 5-0 turnabout when he notified other council members earlier that he would switch sides.

Councilman William Paparian, who with Councilman Isaac Richard had proposed the pay raise, also switched his vote. Richard left the council chambers without voting. Councilman Rick Cole, the fourth vote for the pay raise, abstained. Council members Chris Holden, William Thomson and Kathryn Nack had opposed the pay raise.

“I misjudged the public; I misjudged the furor,” Hughston said after the vote.

The furor was due, in part, to the size of the increase. But the method also angered many.

Under the City Charter, council pay must be approved at the polls. In the past two years, voters twice turned down a pay raise, most recently rejecting a modest proposal of $935 monthly in June, 1990.

But the council made a legal end run by proposing to increase salaries to $2,950 a month when it meets as the city’s Community Development Commission. The commission can set its own salary without a public vote.

Council members receive $50 for each meeting of the council and another $50 for each meeting of the Community Development Commission, with a maximum combined pay of $500 monthly or $6,000 yearly for each council member. The pay raise would have boosted combined council and commission pay to $38,400 yearly.

Some speakers at the council meeting supported the increase.

“It is outrageous, the opposition to this pay raise,” said attorney Christopher Sutton, a longtime City Hall critic. “The underlying problem in Southern California is the lack of compensation. It’s the reason cities are in trouble.”

Manuel Valle, a member of the Black Males’ Forum, said the pay increase would have enabled working people like himself to run for office. “I’m really sorry to see this go down the way it’s going,” he said.

But many others opposing the pay raise said the council failed to act ethically.

“If the council can’t graduate to virtue, we’ll sure provide them with a little training in the stuff,” said Robert Curlender, who presented the council a cartoon of the City Hall dome adorned with a skull and crossbones flag.

Planning Commissioner Bill York called the council members who initially voted for the raise the “Gang of Four.” He accused them of making political deals and predicted they would next carve up the boundaries of Holden’s district in revenge for Holden’s opposition to the pay raise.

York also called for Richard’s resignation “as a way he might contribute to good government in this city.”

This split reaction characterized public opinion on the vote, Hughston said. He decided to switch his vote because the division between supporters of the pay increase and those opposed appeared to be increasing in intensity instead of subsiding.

Hughston said that although some residents urged him to stand firm, others were intensely upset. Some of them made anonymous and obscene phone calls to his home, upsetting his wife, Sylvia, he said.

The growing divisiveness and bitterness among residents were reflected in the council, he said, whose members squabbled with each other in subcommittee meetings and via newspaper quotes. Hughston felt they would not be able to function effectively if they went through with the raise.

But the final blow came, Hughston said, when Cole announced that he supported the pay raise in principle but would not accept the money. “Cole’s position diminished our stand,” Hughston said.

Cole said he decided to reject the money because the idea of paying council members a larger wage was getting obscured in personal attacks on him. Cole, who earns no salary and says he is self-employed while he creates a nonprofit corporation to assist city governments, was accused of voting for a pay raise out of self-interest.

“I never said I’m not paid enough,” Cole said. “What I’ve said strongly and repeatedly is that the fact that the council pay has not been increased in 23 years is grossly inadequate and inequitable.”