During a special meeting Thursday, the Carbon County Commission voted to increase the salaries of six elected officials beginning in 2017.
The majority of the commissioners agreed to increase the salaries by 1 percent beginning in January 2017, and by 2 percent starting in January 2018. The increases for the elected officials, which include the assessor, clerk of court, coroner, county clerk, sheriff and treasurer, come as their departments will likely take up to a 5 percent budget cut.
The commissioners recently discussed the issue at their regular meeting May 6, and held the special Thursday meeting to meet their June 1 deadline. The board needed to pass a resolution one way or another by that deadline date.
“If we don’t raise, at this opportunity, the salaries of our elected officials, I’m strongly concerned that when whoever is on the commission at that time begins to raise them again, the makeup will be a huge amount,” Commission Chairman Leo Chapman said at the special meeting. “According to some of these ISC (Industrial Siting Council) reports we’ll have plenty of funds to do it, but we can’t live on those funds. Those funds have to be carefully guarded.”
Three commissioners were in favor of the increase, and only one, commissioner Sue Jones, opposed. Commissioner Lindy Glode was not present at the special meeting.
Jones said she had a problem with giving official raises while departments were expected to take a 5 percent cut.
“I do have problems with giving the raise, to be brutally honest,” Jones said. “We’re asking to cut budgets back by 5 percent, and we don’t know what’s going to be out there with a whole bunch of ifs and maybes. We also need to get real numbers, real figures and all the figures together. There’s also payroll taxes on top of pay raises, and all of that is added in there.”
The board members also froze their own salaries at $25,000 a year for the next four years. The salaries of the six elected officials will remain at $71,020 for the next year-and-a-half, but under the sliding scale increase, go up to $73,100 on January 1, 2018.
The commissioners also turned down Carbon County Attorney Cal Rerucha’s generous offer to take a 10 percent cut to his $100,000 a year salary. So his department could meet the proposed budget cut, Rerucha brought up a possible $10,000 reduction in his salary at the May 6 meeting.
“If you’re going to have a budget that has a 5 percent decrease, then it would make my job a lot easier if you decreased the elected’s salary by the same amount,” Rerucha said at the special meeting.
Jones said she thought staff salaries would not be affected by a 5 percent across the board budget cut.
“The cuts wouldn’t be into individual salaries, that 5 percent,” she said. “You don’t go cut peoples’ wages.”
County Clerk Gwynn Bartlett, on the other hand, said any future budget cuts to their departments could only come from the staff salaries. Bartlett said there was nowhere else to make the cuts outside of the salaries.
“With almost every budget that was turned in, the salaries are the only place we have left to cut,” she said. “I cannot run my office on anything less than what I’m using for operations now. So, that is what would be cut.”
On a positive note, Chapman said he felt that Carbon County’s economy would improve in the coming years, and that any further cuts would not likely be needed after this year.
“I feel strongly about our economy getting better,” he said.
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