Summary: More than ten years after the last one, Cathedral City is contemplating a pay raise for its council. Despite sensationalistic headlines about a 47% increase, the total amount in controversy is roughly $22,000. In fact, the entire council’s pay per annum is less than the pay of a single cop or firefighter. In her typical pandering way, outgoing Mayor Kathleen DeRosa (who pulls down I handsome pension from Southern California Edison) is attempting to oppose the increase. Opposing adequate pay for city Council members is both racist and classist. If only the white and the well-off can afford to serve in elective public office, it sends a message to Cathedral City’s Latino majority that “no Latinos need apply.” This position, apparently held by both DeRosa and outgoing New Yorker councilmember Sam Toles, does not reflect well upon our community. While the screamers and low information voters may try to make an issue of this, more reasonable residents should understand that councilmembers, like anybody else in the workforce, deserve to be adequately compensated.
After more than a decade, the issue of a pay raise for Cathedral City’s astonishingly ill paid council is back on the agenda. Because there has been no salary increase for council members and Cathedral City in that lengthy time, the proposed increase — which simply accounts for inflation — is approximately 47%.
Almost immediately, the comment threads on social media networks lit up.
Gratifyingly, many of the comments from within Cathedral City were supportive, well thought out, and articulate.
Of course, nonresidents and the occasional resident Tea Partisans, including well-debunked perennial council wannabe Jens Mueller, were quick to weigh in with predictable attack talking points lambasting the “greediness” of the council.
Also weighing in against the salary increase was outgoing, lame-duck, so-called Five-Star Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa.
That DeRosa would weigh in against the salary increase is not surprising. Her reputation for pandering to her base, a group of low information voters often referred to as her “Flying Monkeys,” has become almost legendary. Yet, DeRosa’s opposition to the salary increase says as much about the pervasive streak of racism in her character as it does about any concern she might have for fiscal discipline.
For indeed, the fiscal discipline argument essentially goes nowhere. The total increase in salary outlay for the Council comes to a little bit more than $22,000. The total salary burden for the city is less than that which the city bears to write paychecks for one single cop or firefighter. Let me say that again. The city pays less for the entire council per annum than it does for one single cop or firefighter.
Because, when it comes down to it, Cathedral City, like many other cities, premises the highest levels of its municipal governance on a series of assumptions that are both racist and classist.
Traditionally, elected representatives of the public were either unpaid or were paid nominal stipends. One commentor, casting his two cents in on The Desert Sun’s comment thread, urged that councilmember should be paid a single dollar per annum. The problem with paying no salary or nominal stipends is simple. It automatically restricts elective service to the white and the well-off.
Cathedral City is roughly 55% Latino; it is also a working city, many of whose residents cannot afford to take on the added burden of service on the Council unless service on the Council pays enough to make it worthwhile.
Having served eight years as a city councilmember, I can attest to the fact that service on the Council comes close to being a second full-time job. In addition to having to represent the city on numerous regional boards and commissions, councilmembers are expected to read about, learn, and be able to cast an informed vote on a whole variety of issues that come before the Council in the course of its duties.
And here is where DeRosa’s objection to the Council raise becomes so blatantly racist and hypocritical. DeRosa has made no secret of her disdain for Cathedral City’s substantial Latino population. Indeed, in a city that is roughly 55% Latino, the Council musters only one member with a Latino surname. DeRosa prefers it that way, and knows that if Council salaries are kept low, many otherwise qualified Latino candidates will be deterred from running.
The record of the other New Yorker on the Council, lame-duck Sam Toles, is no better. At seemingly every Council meeting in which he was actually personally present to participate, Toles would deliver himself of a self-congratulatory monologue to the effect that his six-figure private-sector job spared him from having to accept the city’s benefit package. Toles would also break his arm patting himself on the back to remind his constituents that he, well compensated as he was in the private sector, gave his municipal salary away to charity.
Aside from being noblesse oblige bullshit, Sam Toles’s message to the community was also just about as dog whistle racist as he could have made it. In effect, what Sam Toles was saying to our Latino-majority constituency was “I am far too wealthy and far too entitled for the likes of you. You should be grateful that I, the White Knight from New York, am here to govern you. No Latinos need apply.”
As racist as the DeRosa position may be, it’s also classist. Now history teaches us that traditional policies of restricting elected public service to non-stipendiary or nominal salary status were largely intended to ensure that only “the best people” were able to serve. The so-called progressive movement of the early twentieth century adhered to the notion that society’s best people were also its best off people.
Even today, many low information voters continue to believe that the wealthier you are, the more incorruptible you are. Nothing could be further from the truth. Much always wants more, and the empirical evidence of generations of experience tells us that independent wealth is no guarantee that an elected public official will not be corrupt. Every now and again, a corruption scandal involving conspicuously affluent members of Congress or a state legislature erupts to remind us that your probity is not a function of the depth of your pocketbook.
Indeed, we should not even assume that the DeRosa position on the salary increase is the result of anything more than craven political calculation. Of course, DeRosa pulls down a handsome pension from Southern California Edison, and her presumptive successor, former police chief and now-councilmember Stanley Henry, pulls down a PERS pension in excess of $17,000 a month, all of it paid for by us, the taxpayers of Cathedral City. Moreover, a number of declared Council candidates, several of them DeRosa Flying Monkeys, have spouses who are also compensated in the six-figure range by other employers. (More on that as the campaign moves forward.)
Thus, we should view with a very jaundiced eye any claims or comments DeRosa has to make on this issue, and we should also reject out of hand any statements Sam Toles may utter in opposition to the salary increase. Neither one of them has a legitimate thing to say.
The laborer is worthy of his hire. Luke 10:7. So is a Cathedral City city councilmember. The salary raise will probably pass on a 3-2 vote, and the screamers will try to make a campaign issue. The rest of us should not allow dime wise and dollar foolish thinking to carry the day.
