Every employee (including CC members) deserves a raise. It's common sense. Raising the salary won't attract others. Retired people and higher income residents are more likely to be CC members in ANY city. The higher your income, the more likely you are to vote. You're paying higher taxes. Higher income people/retired people are more interested in running for city council. It's wonderful that they're looking for diversity, but it's not reality. Raising the salary would still be a very low salary. If lower income people need/want more money, they'll get a second job. Not run for CC. Lack of desire would be the main reason certain residents wouldn't run. They don't want the job. If someone isn't interested, you need to accept it. Not fill a few boxes and throw in few hundred extra dollars. CC members need to be QUALIFIED.

Thank you Councilmembers Lauing and Stone for bringing this recommendation forward. I see how hard you all work and how much time you put in. I have spoken with many people across the city who care deeply about the governance of our schools and our community writ large. Many of them simply cannot afford to work fewer hours to take on these roles or reduce to part time or pay for a sitter for their young children so they can be at meetings late. Increasing the pay opens the door to a larger diversity of candidates. The voters still get to decide for whom they want to cast their ballot but having a diversity of candidates (age, ethnicity, income, homeownership, occupation, etc) only makes for a stronger field of candidates and hopefully a stronger council in the end. Thank you!

If it helps a more diverse group be willing to serve, I support raising council pay.

Stop talking about City Council pay as a “salary”. $1,000/month is an honorarium in this area. Minimum wage is almost $18/hour here. If a CC member works 20-40 hours a week, they are not making minimum wage.

The article needs a correction or clarification. “Council members in cities like Palo Alto, which have between 50,000 and 75,000 residents, would have an upper limit of $1,600.” Is that upper limit or lower limit? A later statement seems to indicate lower.

Do we need to amend the charter to adjust the amount by cost-of-living? If the state amount is $1600, shouldn’t we adjust that by regional cost of living, which can mean multiplied by a few times in other parts of the state? We would still be pinning the amount to state guidelines, just adjusting by area cost of living. There should be more of that in public policies, particularly where income limits are concerned.

Right now CC is a volunteer position with an honorarium, it’s not a salaried job. It should be a salaried position, at least part-time if we’re not expecting people to give up their work (and we shouldn’t, with term limits).

I say this as someone who will never run for Council no matter what it pays. It should pay an actual salary so people from all walks of life can consider serving.

@Silver Linings, thanks for that reality statement. A "$600 SALARY Raise" is a misnomer for sure! Instead of focusing on "salaries" under $20,000, how about reporting on all the real city salaries that are over $300,000 and/or that the city still allowed Benitez to collect his lucrative lifetime pension and benefits after he cost us $525,000 in legal settlements.

Don't we have enough real waste her to cover?

@Online Name,
You have a beef, sure. It's irrelevant to my post. I'm not on the Council and I'm not the one to be directing your concern to.

The fact that a City with our budget has a volunteer City Council that only rich people can afford to serve on is a problem. It's meant the Council has been overpopulated by development interests and people from the North Side of town, where our City assets and resources are--no surprise--concentrated, whereas in the South, denser developments keep getting concentrated without commensurate walkable City asset investment. Before the pandemic, the office overdevelopment meant the City assets on the North side of town became increasingly inaccessible to people from the South because of traffic--which also killed a lot of businesses as residents eventually gave up going to their favorite businesses. (It is a pipe dream to think you can just built over businesses to create enough "local" demand--if that were true, we should just be concentrating all of our development above Stanford Mall.) Having City councilmembers who are making an actual salary would make it possible for people who aren't rich or essentially special-interest stooges to serve on the Council. When they are making the equivalent of less than minimum wage, this is not a "salary". It's not even called a "salary" in the City code, or at least, it didn't used to be.