Mayors in Green Bay might get yearly raises forever following Personnel Committee members’ unanimous recommendation on June 17.
The recommendation, if adopted at the City Council’s next meeting on June 24, would start off the next mayor with a base salary of $128,547. Salary changes cannot be made in the middle of a mayor’s term, according to city staff, which is why the recommended salary jump would begin at the start of the next mayoral term in 2027.
The salary would then increase 3.5% each year to match the yearly raise already given to general city employees.
Council member Brian Johnson modified the language originally drafted by city staff to include wording that would make the annual raise occur “in perpetuity,” removing the responsibility from the city’s legislative body and employees of proposing changes to the mayor’s salary.
Why does the committee want the mayor to get a raise?
The automatic nature of the raises was to stave off future politicking, attract the best candidates for the job, and to reflect the workload of the city’s chief executive officer, according to Johnson and council member Bill Galvin. Otherwise, the mayor’s salary could be “weaponized,” they said, and the city’s chief executive officer could go without a raise for years.
“We wouldn’t treat an employee that way,” Johnson said, “so I don’t know why we would treat our chief executive that way.”
Mayor Eric Genrich currently makes $102,298.55 a year, not including benefits. The salary came out of an agreement approved by the City Council in 2018 to adopt a $20,000 pay raise from 2018 to 2022. Prior to 2018, the last time the Green Bay mayor got a raise was in 2010 under former mayor Jim Schmitt.
Under a 3.5% annual increase, the mayor’s salary would rise $52,776 over the next decade: 2027 – $128,547; 2028 – $133,046; 2029 – $137,702; 2030 – $142,521; 2031 – $147,509; 2032 – $152,671; 2033 – $158,014; 2034 – $163,544; 2035 – $169,268; 2036 – $175,192; and 2037 – $181,323.
How did the committee decide on the mayor’s proposed raise?
City staff had initially proposed during the last Personnel Committee meeting a 3% raise every year for four years beginning in 2027. A memo showing 15 Wisconsin municipalities, their populations and their mayoral salaries was provided, and the committee members balked at the results: Greenfield, a Milwaukee suburb with a population of just over 36,000, was paying its mayor $107,040, about $5,000 more than Green Bay’s mayor, noted council member Jennifer Grant.
Not only was the salary of Green Bay’s mayor paltry compared to smaller municipalities, they said, Galvin and council member Kathy Hinkfuss further mentioned that the mayor’s compensation was meager compared to what was offered in the corporate world. Potential mayoral candidates could turn their noses up at the public-sector position and never bring their skillsets to City Hall, they said.
But the memo was slim on information, and the committee members wanted a more thorough review of comparable cities before approving a mayoral raise. They sent the city staff back to produce a more exhaustive compensation study, which the city staff provided at the June 17 Personnel Committee meeting.
What did the compensation studies show?
Two studies were done.
One, by the insurance broker Cottingham & Butler, looked at at the salaries of mayors in 20 comparable Wisconsin municipalities from Appleton to Racine, Wausau to Waukesha.
It found that the median mayoral salary was $101,700.
The second study compiled by city staff showed chief executive salaries from 24 municipalities including Green Bay.
Generally, the data show that mayoral salaries increase as population increases. That correlation, however, is very weak.
For example, Madison is about half the size of Milwaukee, yet their mayors make about the same salary – $168,193 and $169,436, respectively.
Even disregarding the two largest cities in Wisconsin, smaller cities between 30,000 and 50,000 people had wide disparities in how much they pay their mayors. There’s only about a 2,000-person difference in La Crosse’s and Sheboygan’s populations, yet La Crosse’s mayor is paid over $30,000 more. And Greenfield, with about 9,000 fewer people than Sheboygan, pays its mayor about $50,000 more.
The correlation between salaries and population breaks down even more when including municipalities with city administrators or managers. (Many cities have both city administrators and mayors. With the exception of Madison, the administrator is paid more than the mayor.)
The city administrator for Janesville is paid $248,346, a salary more than double that of the Green Bay mayor’s to run a city with about two-thirds of Green Bay’s population.
And the range of the highest paid chief executive salaries go anywhere between $50,000 to $250,000 in the bulk of Wisconsin cities studied, which have less than 100,000 people living in them, making population an extremely poor indicator for how much a city’s top executive makes.
Proposing to raise the Green Bay mayor’s salary to over $128,000, then, would put the mayor around the 75th percentile of studied salaries, which Johnson said he wanted. It would bring Green Bay’s mayor in line with typically even more highly compensated city administrators who were professionally hired and unelected to oversee all city operations.
Jesse Lin is a reporter covering the community of Green Bay and its surroundings, as well as politics in northeastern Wisconsin. Contact him at 920-834-4250 or jlin@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Green Bay’s next mayor could get a raise. But how much does the mayor make versus others?
Reporting by Jesse Lin, Green Bay Press-Gazette / Green Bay Press-Gazette
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