Like others in Sandy, I was shocked to learn our newly elected mayor had presumed to award himself a significant salary increase.
As has been reported in The Salt Lake Tribune, Mayor Kurt Bradburn was quick to fall on his sword after public outcry and immediately ordered his own salary reduced to put it below what mayors of Utah’s other most populous cities make.
Well and good, lesson learned, one might be tempted to say. Indeed, Bradburn himself has implored us to take that view, insisting that he just “got this one wrong” and asking for the continued confidence of the Sandy electorate. But is that confidence warranted? Sandy has cause to question.
Consider the logic applied in his decision-making process. The mayor reasoned that as his dismissal of employees, including paid lobbyists — in itself a questionable move for a city leader with zero Capitol Hill experience — had freed up money in his budget, he was free to dispose of the savings in ways that benefitted not just himself, but his newly appointed chief administrative officer (his former campaign manager), city attorney (a colleague from his previous job) and his new deputy mayor (a local director for a conservative PAC).
Setting aside the hubris that assumes these less experienced individuals — including himself — are worth more to the city than their more experienced predecessors, what is noteworthy here is that the mayor saw no need to consult the Sandy City Council, or even Sandy’s employee compensation manual.
That’s a pretty big one to “get wrong.” This is analogous to a CEO ordering favorable adjustments to executive compensation without consulting company bylaws or seeking approval from the board of directors. Such behavior would not be tolerated in the private sector and, as public sector “shareholders,” we should not tolerate it either.
What’s particularly galling about the mayor’s actions is the fact that candidate Kurt Bradburn made questions of transparency and salary within the mayor’s office central issues of his campaign.
“It’s no secret that Sandy City has some of the highest paid public officials in the state,” read a bullet item from his campaign website, characterizing this as problem. On that same page, he pledged to “eliminate salary increases for the Mayor’s Office.”
Bradburn’s near-immediate attempt to secure himself as Utah’s highest-paid mayor does not square with his explicit position on the matter during the campaign. Neither does his subsequent statement to The Tribune that the “idea was to give salary increases at the beginning of his term and not raise them again for four years,” as though awarding raises in advance were innocuous or somehow innovative.
In fact, his actions are so self-serving and so contradictory to the way he represented himself during the campaign as to call not just his judgement, but his integrity into question.
That is hard to write off as a rookie mistake.
The task before Bradburn now is to convince us that our mayor doesn’t need the six o’clock news to keep him honest. So far, his actions have served to turn him into the caricature he painted of former Mayor Tom Dolan. Sandy requires Kurt Bradburn to be the man he said he was running as, not the man he said he was running against.
Derron Fairbanks
Derron Fairbanks grew up in Sandy, where he and his wife have also lived for 19 years. He works as an engineering manager in the computer software industry. His father is Steve Fairbanks, a sitting member of the Sandy City Council. His opinions are his own.