Pay raises for elected public officials are almost always received as well as Granny’s fruitcake at Christmas.
Imagine Lurch, with his sigh and long-suffering look, and you’ll understand the negative baseline sentiment.
Much of it likely is rooted in cynicism. Voters dislike the appearance of insiders voting themselves a pay raise or a bonus.
Well, in the city of Fort Worth, the mayor and City Council don’t have that luxury. The voters decide if their elected city officials will get a raise or not through a charter amendment election.
Voters have twice rejected charter amendments to raise the pay of the Fort Worth mayor and City Council in the past 10 years, though the losing margins shrunk markedly between the elections in 2016 and 2022.
All indications suggest that a proposal to increase City Council pay will once again go before voters in May. Staff and city leaders will continue to study the matter after the new year.
Voters in the recent past simply haven’t connected higher pay with better governance. Moreover, Fort Worth’s civic DNA — written into the 1924 reform charter — treats council service as stewardship, not employment. A raise feels like money out with no public benefit in. And until that perception changes, the answer at the ballot box will likely stay the same.
Fort Worth lags way behind its Texas peers in mayor and council pay. Through an election in 2006, the City Council is paid $25,000 each year. The mayor is pulling down $29,000 a year.
Dallas’ mayor and council are both paid $60,000 a year. Voters there last year turned down a charter amendment that would increase the mayor’s pay to $110,000 and the council’s to $90,000. San Antonio’s mayor makes $61,725, while the council earns more than $45,000.
The Austin City Council gave itself a nice raise in 2023, to more than $116,000 for council members and more than $134,000, a 40% increase in pay from 2022 to 2023, according to reports.
Houston is the one exception among the big cities where the mayor is significantly stronger than in the classic council-manager cities. Houston is technically a “strong mayor–council” hybrid, but it still employs an appointed city administrator and extensive professional management functions. Mayor John Whitmire earns more than $236,000 a year. Councilmembers are paid $62,983.
The failed 2022 measure in Fort Worth would have tied pay to one-half of the average salary of department and assistant department directors. Numbers at the time translated to roughly $99,000 for the mayor and $76,000 for council members. Those figures would be higher today if the same indexing formula were used. Staff also suggested the possibility of adopting a fixed base salary with an annual adjustment mechanism, indexing pay to an external benchmark such as Tarrant County median household income or allowing the council to set salaries by ordinance but with a defined cap, as the city of Austin does.
Staff also recommended the possibility of adding term limits to the charter or staggering terms. Terms limits are currently inherent in the City Council because few, if any, want to work and sacrifice that long for so little a paycheck.
Do the mayor and members of the Fort Worth City Council need pay raises? Yes. This is a part-time job with full-time hours.
Will the voters give them one? Probably not.
Along with the city being the fastest-growing big city in the U.S. comes more complex governing issues and a much more demanding workload for council members. However, studies show that increased city size and job complexity rarely increases voters’ willingness to approve raises.
When Fort Worth adopted its current council-manager form of government in 1924, proponents argued that the city needed a more professional, nonpolitical, and coordinated system of administration.
The idea of a professional at the helm of the city was part of a reform era trend sweeping the country.
The council-manager format was one that separated policymaking from day-to-day operations, curbed waste and patronage, and placed the city’s business in the hands of a trained executive rather than politicians chosen “at random” for offices requiring technical skill.
The manager plan, unlike the charter of 1909, they believed, would deliver efficiency, fiscal stability, accountability, and predictability that the commission form had failed to provide.
And then there was this, said the Citizens Municipal League: The elected City Council, the representative democracy of the city, serve for nominal salaries — or none at all.
“They give time to direct city affairs through the city manager and are left free to continue private careers.”
Seemingly since that day, Fort Worth, today a city of more than 1 million but then a city of about 120,000, has maintained a civic tradition reinforcing the idea that public service should be undertaken for the love of the city — something akin to serving on the church council.
In fact, it was noted that the charter’s writers — the commission of 35 was led by Van Zandt Jarvis and included K.M. Van Zandt, John P. King, John Laneri, and Ben E. Keith — served without any compensation.
They also clearly wanted to squeeze out career politicians. Whatever the cause and effect, it has seemed to do so. Almost all who have served on the council, just simply left public service after their terms. Only Kay Granger left for a long career in Congress. Former Mayor Hugh Parmer and Wendy Davis followed council service with careers in the Texas state Senate. Former Mayor Woodie Woods took a stab at the state Senate but lost, and Jim Bradshaw had two notable knock-down, drag out runs for the U.S. House of Representatives against Majority Leader Jim Wright and Tom Vandergriff in 1980 and 1982. Mike Moncrief had a long career in politics before he closed it as mayor of Fort Worth.
There is an assumption that better pay would attract a broader pool of candidates that stretch across socioeconomic sectors, but a study by Nicholas Carnes of Duke University and Eric R. Hansen of University of North Carolinadisputes the conventional wisdom.
The study published by the American Political Science Review shows that states that pay legislators more tend to have fewer working-class lawmakers. Higher salaries mainly attract career politicians and affluent professionals, not workers.
Though the research examined state legislatures, the mechanisms it identifies — who runs, who wins, and whether higher pay widens the socioeconomic pool — translate directly into all levels of representative government.
“You will never get expert skill in your municipal departments for $250 a month,” argued Sidney Samuels, the esteemed man of letters and noted Fort Worth attorney in 1924, referring to what the elected commissioners — effectively the city’s department overlords — were being paid according to the 1909 charter.
However, can you get good servant leader and steward on the City Council?
Forty years ago, Mayor Bob Bolen worked for $75 a meeting — plus expenses.
So, yes.
