WARNER ROBINS, Ga. — Members of Warner Robins city council are thinking about giving themselves a raise.
This week, they took another step towards boosting their pay.
One council member in particular is leading the charge on this: Clifford Holmes. He first raised the issue about a month ago and pushed the issue again this week when he called for a vote to begin the process of raising council's salary. He's made two major claims to support his argument.
The first is that city council hasn't received a raise in 22 years. His second: they're paid less than council-level elected officials in other comparably-sized cities.
We wanted to know if this is true. We got a historical perspective from long-serving Warner Robins city attorney Jim Elliott and spoke with officials in three other comparable city governments: Albany, Alpharetta, and Johns Creek. We also checked all the cities' budgets.
The first thing we learned is that Holmes' claim about the length of time since a raise is true. Jim Elliott's been the city attorney in Warner Robins for over 30 years and confirmed it via text message.
As for the pay gap claim, that one's a little more complicated. According to the US Census, Warner Robins has about 74,000 people. Their closest match in size is Albany, with about 73,000 residents.
The next largest is Johns Creek at around 84,000, and Alpharetta rounds out our list of comparably-sized cities on the low end at a population of around 66,000.
According to the Warner Robins city code, their city council gets paid a salary of $5,000 a year.
The Albany city clerk's office says city commissioners there get $15,000 a year
Alpharetta's assistant city administrator James Drinkard says their council also gets a $15,000 salary.
According to Johns Creek's communications director Bob Mullen, the council there also makes $15,000 a year.
So on this count, Holmes is right, but that's not the full picture. In many cities, taxpayers don't just pay officials' salaries. Elected officials' compensation packages can also include things like travel expenses, retirement benefits, insurance, and training, among many others.
Warner Robins' fiscal year 2019 budget takes this into account, allotting about $214,000 to city council benefits and expenses. That breaks down to roughly $35,700 per council member.
In Johns Creek, a larger city, they've budgeted for more than $320,000, which breaks down to about $53,000 per member, and in Alpharetta, a smaller city, the assistant city administrator there says city council members are compensated between approximately $33,150 and $50,730 per year, depending on what they opt in and out of.
Albany's budget data for its city commissioners was lumped in with its mayoral budget, which makes getting an exact figure on commissioner compensation difficult.
However, the city clerk's office there said the mayor has a salary of $25,000 annually and several of the elected officials' budget line items are designated exclusively for the mayor. When those are stripped out, a rough accounting shows city commissioners are budgeted for about $184,000 in benefits and expenses. That breaks down to around $30,000 per commission member.
(NOTE: several line items, including insurance and FICA match funding, were impossible to delineate between mayoral and commission funds. If all data was available, it would likely lower the commissioners budget slightly but would not significantly change the meaning of the data).
So we can verify that Warner Robins council members are compensated less than their all of their counterparts in Johns Creek and some in Alpharetta, but are compensated more than at least one of their counterparts in Alpharetta and all of them in Albany.
To be clear, Warner Robins' city council pay raise is not a done deal yet. Though a majority of council voted in favor of moving forward Monday night, there will now be a 3- week public comment period before council can make a final vote to approve or deny the pay raise.
Holmes says the increase would come out to a raise of about $5,000 per council member