John McNamara at the New Britain Democrat Blog has been complaining again about the Mayor’s salary. In his latest post he is calling the Mayor hypocritical for taking raises in the past two years and he also has accused the Mayor of “dissembling,” which is merely a polite way to call someone a liar. Mr. McNamara takes issue with Mayor Stewart, saying “I haven’t had a raise and I’m not asking for one.”
Before one can understand the validity of that claim one needs to understand how salaries for full-time elected officials are set.
Every odd election year the Common Council is supposed to convene a special committee called the Compensation Committee. This group proposes salaries for the following two years for all elected full-time employees. These offices include Town Clerk, Mayor, Tax Collector and Registrar of Voters. Their recommendation is then brought before the Common Council where it can be amended and passed as a resolution. Once passed this becomes the binding document setting the salaries for the next two years for those offices.
This entire process takes place well before the November election so it is impossible for those involved in the process to know who will be the candidates for the respected offices, let alone who will eventually hold those offices. So in these negotiations the Mayor is never setting his own salary, he is merely setting the salary for the office, regardless of whether he wins or not.
So McNamara would like us to believe that Mayor Stewart is setting his own pay scale when the democrats have no one to blame but themselves for the raises that the mayor has received. The ultimate kicker, however, is that this year the democrat controlled Common Council was derelict in their duties and failed to even convene the Compensation Committee.
