Letter ot the Editor - Lakewood Councilman speaks against rising city salary costs.

Reference to January 7, 2009 post on "Rising salary and benefit costs in City Hall".

I appreciate the heads up email from you and your interest and hard work in public employee compensation. I’m a city councilman in Lakewood and have had similar concerns for several years. I wish I could provide you the answer to the unwarranted increases. Unfortunately, most of my efforts to trim compensation increases have not been successful. So I don’t have the solution – except to say that you are doing the right thing by informing the public. Taxpayers can get what they want if they apply enough pressure, so your blog is a good start. But in my opinion, you have to build a high level of public outrage that will result in great numbers of citizens getting involved in some way to have a dampening effect on these large increases.

One thing I can confidently say is, do not rely on bureaucrats nor most elected officials to fix the problem for you. The reasons are pretty obvious. Plus, have they ever fixed the problem or have they contributed to it? Like him or hate him, Tim Eyman has been the only force reducing taxes and spending at the state level. That should tell you something.

Redmond is not alone with this problem. Public sector wages far outstrip private sector wages at every level of government statewide. And the rate of increase year-to-year is higher too. Unions are partially to blame. Governments are about the only segment of the labor market where unionization is increasing – public employee unions. Avoid them like the plague.

But beyond unions, there’s no incentive for government leaders to reduce compensation – nor the general growth of government, for that matter. Bureaucratic leaders’ lives are made easier by granting big increases to their employees. And elected officials win votes by delivering more and more services. Plus, they’re not spending their own money. So again, I think it is going to fall on the people of Redmond to either elect very conservative council members who will get the job done, or else to apply extraordinary pressure on sitting council members to lower employee costs.

And finally, as I said before, this is a state-wide problem. Employees in Redmond look at the salary increases given to employees in Lakewood and say, I want that too. They threaten to unionize or move to higher paying cities. The same with Lakewood employees – they look at your wages/benefits. There are 281 cities/towns in Washington, so multiply all that by 281. It’s a tangled mess. City employees play us off on one another. No one city can take it on alone, even with a conservative council. But if we could all work together to reduce public employee compensation, it can be done. I’m with you. It needs to happen.

Pad Flinnigan
City Councilman
City of Lakewood
Lakewood , WA. website

cc: Redmond City Council & Mayor John Marchione