Arlington, 196,000 people, is larger than all the major cities in Connecticut. We’re larger than Savannah, Ga., 128,000, and Worcester, Mass. ,176,000. Ann Arbor, and Lansing, Mich., 113,000, and 116,000, fall beneath us. We edge out Salt Lake City, 179,000, Providence, R.I., 177,000, and our own Richmond, Va., 194,000. We tie Tacoma, Wash. In fact, we’re almost the size of Reno, Nev., 203,000.
We have an annual budget of around $1 billion, including our schools.
And we pay the elected county board members about $30,000 per year.
The county board is set to discuss, take public comment on, and vote on whether to change this amount, and by how much, at their Jan. 27 board meeting. By law they must make changes by July 1 or be silent another four years. The changes cannot take effect until Jan. 1, 2008, after November elections and a new board is sworn in. They would vote on what the maximum salary would be, but they wouldn’t have to allocate it.
The job is considered a part-time position, but is that what it really is, and is that what Arlington needs? I’ve been batting around this question for more than a week.
Board members spend time every evening and weekend at meetings. If they work another job, they take time away from that one to conduct county business during the day. Board members represent Arlington in regional and national governance boards, from regional transit bodies to the National Association of Counties.
As County Board Member Chris Zimmerman told me in a recent interview, the county board job easily fills whatever time is available; there’s always something to do. He quit his full-time job a couple years after his first election in order to have enough time for the county and his family, he said, as a full-time job just didn’t fit. But he’s lucky in that he has a wife who supports his part-time work and the pay-cut that came with it. She has a full-time job with insurance benefits to cover the family.
On average, the county boards of Prince William County, Fairfax County and Alexandria City earn $47,000 per year, a number skewed up the scale by Fairfax’s new $75,000 salary set to take effect next January, according to the county manager’s report.
The county manager’s report is clear in its belief that our board should vote an increase in salary; the report cites a good benchmark as the 75th percentile of board pay regionally, about $56,000.
I keep coming back to the question of how much of a professional board do we want? Is $56,000 enough, or should we jump up to $75,000, or more? Are we at a point in our development to begin thinking of ourselves as a medium-sized city that requires full-time oversight by a professional board that earns enough to have just this one job?
But then I asked myself, what’s broken that a professional board would fix?
That’s where I’m stumped. Certainly, Arlington has problems that require attention, but would a highly-paid, full-time board fix them? I can’t see why they would.
Is the pay keeping away good candidates? It has not increased in a decade, other than cost-of-living, and yet people sit on the board, and not too few campaign for those seats.
Still, I wouldn’t want too little money keeping a qualified candidate from running.
So I say, raise the maximum to the $56,000, but don’t take it all when you budget the tax revenue. A 30 percent raise is large and moves the county above Prince William. Do that.
Steve Thurston writes About Arlington for The Connection every other week and posts to his blog, http://buckinghamheraldtrib.blogspot.com, on Wednesdays and Sundays.