Raise issues

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa deserves credit for rejecting the annual pay increase of $9,283.30 (retroactive to July 1, no less) that was coming to him via a state salary panel’s decision. It’s a step other Los Angeles elected officials have taken previously, and it’s a nice symbol. At a time when the city faces difficult choices -- the result of projected revenues that are too low to meet ongoing commitments -- the mayor is showing leadership by forgoing his raise.

We’ll see whether others in City Hall follow suit and reject the retroactive 4.1% pay hike that will put annual salaries for City Council members at a so-bizarre-it’s-almost-funny $178,789.59. But even if most of the city’s 18 elected officials take the increase, residents shouldn’t allow their outrage to get the better of them. The current method of setting salaries is a good one.

Consider the alternatives. Politicians could set their own pay -- an inherent conflict of interest that voters have previously rejected. They could appoint some local panel that would in turn be lobbied by interests that also have a stake in City Hall action. They could never get any raises at all, leaving us to hear their petulant complaints about how they need to take special-interest money just to get by.

Or we can continue on the wise and independent path set by voters in 1990, taking pay decisions away from the politicians and the people they appoint and putting those choices instead in the hands of a state panel that sets salaries for trial judges and doesn’t give a hoot about the concerns of Los Angeles city officeholders.

Sure, that means a windfall for some. Voters tied their officials’ pay to the lower salaries of Municipal Court judges. Who knew that a decade later the Municipal Courts would be absorbed into the Superior Courts, whose judges earn much higher salaries? Or that judicial pay would continue to rise, for very good reasons? Now City Council members get the same pay as county supervisors, whose pay also is tied to judges’ salaries (yes, salaries are going up for the five L.A. supervisors too). Under the City Charter, the controller gets 10% more, the city attorney 20% more, the mayor 30% more.

We can live with it. Those high salaries wipe away any and all justification for our elected officials’ whining about ethics reforms, disclosure requirements, criticism of their political practices or mockery of their decisions. Disclosure laws make it tougher for them to campaign? Well, boohoo. We’re hard on them for inventing new ways to squeeze dollars from donors who have a big-money stake in City Hall decisions? Our hearts bleed. For the amount of money we’re paying them, they can cry in their beer -- or their very expensive wine.

The flip side of the salary deal that Los Angeles voters made with their elected representatives nearly two decades ago was that politicians were to let go of their claim to need special-interest money just to do their jobs. Voters have put up with too much push-back in the form of good Ethics Commission reform plans tabled or whittled away by the City Council, or fake reforms foisted on them by the political establishment. Every penny of these new pay raises, whether they are accepted or not, must buy a recommitment by City Hall watchdogs and L.A. residents to break the system that too often keeps elected officials focused on fundraising and political advancement rather than the best interests of the city.