The Senate has passed a proposal to raise elected county officials’ salaries but with the caveat that they have to vote to accept the increase.
An amendment stripped the bill of its provision calling for a direct increase.
The measure, H2102, was approved on April 30 by a vote of 26-3.
As originally written, the House bill raised seven county officials’ annual salaries by 13 percent. They include the attorney, assessor, recorder, sheriff, superintendent of schools, supervisor and treasurer.
But a number of senators objected.
One of those who opposed the proposed pay hike was Sen. Ron Gould, R-3, who successfully amended the measure so it now prohibits a salary increase except through a roll call vote of the majority of the board of supervisors in a public meeting.
The Arizona Constitution requires the Legislature to set fixed salaries for elected county officials. These salaries cannot be changed during an office holder’s term.
Last raise was in 2004
The last time their salary was raised was in 2004. That increase took effect in 2005.
The original bill, for example, guaranteed an increase from $109,450 to $123,678 for the county attorney and from $89,225 to $100,824 for the sheriff beginning January 2009.
The Gould amendment, adopted without debate last week, still allows for an increase of up to 13 percent but establishes the maximum salary for elected county officials.
Under the current system, Gould said county officials are “unaccountable to their constituents” as far as pay hikes.
“They can say well, you know, I wouldn’t have taken the salary increase but the Legislature forced it upon us. So this gives them the opportunity to be fiscally responsible and refuse the salary increase. Or they have to take a public vote to accept it,” he said earlier.
Gould, along with Senators Karen Johnson, R-18, and Pamela Gorman, R-6, eventually voted against the measure on third reading.
On April 17, Republicans held H2102 in caucus over concerns that the salary increase it sought was too high.
Majority Whip John Huppenthal said on the surface, the 13 percent wage hike “doesn’t seem reasonable.” He said he’d like more discussion about the issue with the sponsor, Rep. Bill Konopnicki, R-5.
“I don’t really have warm and fuzzy feelings over a couple members of my county board of supervisors,” Gould said during the meeting. “They spent a lot of last year running political hit pieces on me in the local newspaper. They have the public information officer draw a cartoon of me and Senator Harper that defames both myself and Senator Harper and defames the Senate.”
He said the cartoon had drawn the Senate building as an outhouse, with a crescent moon on the door, and the drawing had also contained “veiled references to sodomy.”
“This was done at the taxpayers’ expense,” he said. “I’m not going to give folks a raise that misuse taxpayers’ dollars…”
Sen. Barbara Leff, R-11, said she thought it was an “awfully large raise.” Sen. Linda Gray, R-10, pointed out that the state has been giving teachers a far smaller raise.
“I’d rather give it to the teachers than the people who are signed up for this salary,” she said.
Mohave County official: Lawmaker is being petty
Mohave County manager Ron Walker told an Arizona Capitol Times editor the next day that it was petty for Gould to try to punish some 150 county officials across the state for a problem he had with one county.
“We were just lampooning Gould’s antics at the Capitol last year regarding tax cuts and pork. We don’t think it is right to hold hard-working elected officials throughout the state hostage because someone who makes a lot of jokes can’t seem to take one,” Walker said.
He also denied any subtext of sodomy in the drawing.
He added: “We are not going to be intimidated into not speaking on public policy issues because of someone who is too thin-skinned to take a ribbing.”