No Raise For Salem Mayor: Salary To Hold Steady At $150K For 2 Years

SALEM, MA — The first newly elected Salem mayor in 17 years will maintain the current $150,000 annual salary for the next two years after the Salem City Council Committee on Administration and Finance voted unanimously against giving the office a raise during Thursday night's subcommittee meeting.

There was some discussion about providing a "cost-of-living" increase at the biannual salary review, but in the end, it was determined that $150,000 was comparable to the salaries of other North Shore municipal chief executives and that it would not be appropriate to give the mayor a raise at a time when many city departments are being asked to streamline.

"We're going to have all the department heads come in front of us and talk about their needs and retaining employees in the city," City Councilor Jeff Cohen told the subcommittee. "We're a really lean city. We have less people doing more stuff than most of the cities around us. Many people do multiple tasks.

"We should make a statement that our priority, as far as compensation to the employees of the city, is to retain and attract people in the departments like (the Department of Public Services) and Electrical that are really struggling with all the issues that are happening with getting people who are in the trades to work for a municipal government."

The last raise for the office was approved in 2017 and increased the salary in steps from $120,000 to $150,000. According to City Council rules, the salary voted on Thursday will hold for two years before it is next reviewed.

City Councilor Conrad Prosniewski noted that since the City Council stipends are tied to the mayor's salary, a vote to increase the mayor's salary would essentially be a vote to give a raise to any City Councilors who are re-elected in the next municipal election.

"I do think that we should look at how those two can be separated so that when we're voting the mayor a raise we are not voting one for ourselves," he said. "Maybe there is some other entity or some other way that our salaries would be addressed.

"It just kind of leaves a sour taste publicly. It could be construed that we are in it for self-interest. I don't like the idea that anybody can point fingers at our integrity with that."

Former Salem Mayor Neil Harrington and former City Hall Chief of Staff Dominick Pangallo are the two finalists for the special election to be held on May 16 to fill out the remainder of the term five-time incumbent Kim Driscoll vacated when she was elected as lieutenant governor.

The next mayoral election will come in the regularly scheduled cycle in 2025.

"We want to pay for the job and not for the person just like we do for these other positions within the city," City Council President Megan Stott, who is on the subcommittee, said. "It's really highlighting in the election time right now that we want to entice people to come be the mayor of Salem. It's an open job position right now. And then it will be again in two years.

"So we want to have good, solid, qualified candidates. And I know that the current salary that it is at right now definitely discourages a lot of people from applying and from running. That's just not a salary that a CEO of a company of 4,000 employees would have. It's very much underserved.

"But all we have now for data are the other communities around us and it does look in line with that. So I think that's a lot of the sense of it's a municipal position and you are not paid equal to a CEO at a major corporation even though that's essentially what the job is."

(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at )Scott.Souza@Patch.com. Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)