Elected officials in Virgin have decided forgiveness is the right way to deal with the improper salary increases former Mayor Matt Spendlove and Town Council members awarded themselves.
Rather than recoup the $78,060 in overpayments previous elected officials gave themselves and town planning commissioners between fiscal years 2018 and 2022, Mayor Jean Krause and council members voted 4-1 on Tuesday to forgive the illegal salary increases and make them retroactive.
Council member Paul Luwe was the lone dissenter.
State code requires cities to provide notice at least seven days before a public hearing to increase salaries and to enact increases by passing an ordinance. Former Virgin officials did neither.
Mayoral pay during the period in question shot up from $400 to $1,000 a month, a 150% increase. Council members’ increased their monthly pay by 250%, from $100 to $350. They also more than tripled the Planning Commission chair’s pay from $85 to $325. Pay for others on the commission jumped from $60 to $250.
In talking to The Tribune last month, the mayor characterized the pay hikes as “small potatoes,” while Council member Gene Garate, who has been on the council for three years and voted to approve some of the increases, said recouping the money “would rip the town apart.”
Neither Krause, Garate or other council members who voted for forgiveness at Tuesday’s meeting would return phone calls for comment.
For his part, Luwe said his vote came after weeks of vacillating between voting to forgive or collecting the overpayments.
On one side of the ledger, he noted, was the fact that the legal costs of recouping the illicit pay hikes would likely be as much or more than the amount of money the town could recover. He also worried that taking legal action to recover the money might discourage residents from running for municipal office. Conversely, Lowe worried forgiveness would equate to a lack of accountability on the part of elected officials.
Luwe said he opted against forgiveness after attending a recent truth in taxation hearing as a member of Hurricane Valley Fire Special Services District and watching residents speak against a proposed property tax increase. That led the district board to vote against the tax hike. He said that caused him to reflect on the fact that Virgin residents did not have that opportunity before the pay hikes were awarded in their town.
“When I ran for the town council, I ran on a platform of transparency,” said Luwe, a former city attorney for Bozeman, Montana. “As I told the council [Tuesday night], state law for pay increases requires that they be approved by ordinance and that there will be notice given to the public.”
“So it’s not just a matter of [city officials] failing to do an ordinance,” Luwe added. “It’s failing to do an ordinance to notify the public so they have an opportunity to provide them with comments. The reason the state officials require that, in my view, is because they know citizens … should have a say in what they pay their elected officials.”
Virgin resident Darlene Pope doesn’t quibble about elected officials making more money. She thinks they deserve it. Pope, however, takes issue with how they went about it.
“It just feels wrong,” she said about the council’s vote. “I can understand why they did it. At some point, you have got to move on. But there seems to be no accountability.”
Luwe noticed the illegal increases soon after he took office in January and brought it to the attention of city officials. After weeks of “sleepless nights,” and with the council’s vote this week, he says the issue has finally been “put to bed.”
“As for the future,” he added, “what’s important is that if there is a proposed salary increase, it will be properly noticed and citizens will be given the opportunity to tell us what they think.”