El Paso voters have a history of rejecting pay raises for mayor, city representatives

El Paso voters are being asked in this election about giving pay raises to the mayor and City Council.

This will be the fifth time in 17 years that voters have been asked to approve raising the pay for mayor and council. Only one previous request has been successful.

Pay for elected officials is always an emotional issue for voters. El Paso County Commissioners Court has received some backlash over pay raises it has approved in recent years. But unlike commissioners, City Council members don’t control their own pay. That is set in the City Charter, essentially El Paso’s constitution, and any change to how the mayor and council are paid must be approved by voters.

Council members currently are paid a salary of $29,000 a year and the mayor gets $45,000. That pay rate was set in 2007 and came after voters rejected a pay increase in 2001 and 2004. For many years prior to 2007, council members were paid $18,000 annually and the mayor got $30,000. The salary for mayor and council is set by in the City Charter, so any change requires a charter amendment.

In 2001, El Paso voters voted 58 percent to 42 percent to reject a proposal to set the council salary at $35,000 and the mayor at $55,000.

Another proposal was put to voters in 2004, part of a broad package to overhaul the City Charter and move from a strong mayor form of government to a city manager form of government. Most of the proposed charter amendments passed, but not the pay raise for mayor and council. Voters narrowly rejected, 51-49 percent, a proposal to set the council pay at $30,000 a year and the mayor at $48,000.

Voters finally approved a council pay raise in 2007. By a vote of 59-41 percent, voters approved the current annual salaries of $29,000 for council members and $45,000 for the mayor.

The city went back to voters in 2013 seeking to tie council and mayor pay to the median income for an El Paso family of four, based on figures from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The exact amount of pay wasn’t listed on the ballot, but was calculated at about $45,000 for a council member and $72,000 for mayor. That proposal was shot down by 57-43 percent.

The ballot issue this year is similar to the one voters overwhelmingly rejected in 2013. It reads: “Should section 3.2 of the City Charter, relating to the salaries of the mayor and district representatives, be amended to provide that beginning September 1, 2019, the annual salary of the district representatives shall be set each year at the amount equal to the El Paso county area median household income as established by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development or successor agency for the prior fiscal year, and the annual salary of the mayor shall be set each year at one and one-half that amount?”

The current median family income in El Paso County, according to HUD, is $51,700. So that would be the pay for a council member. The mayor’s pay, set at 150 percent of the median family income, would be $77,550.

Robert Moore, ABC-7’s exclusive 2018 election analyst, is an El Paso journalist who has covered local and state politics since 1986.