Until 2020, Boise’s mayor and City Council members got regular 3% raises, just like the city’s staff. But when COVID-19 hit, they lowered their own salary increases to 2% over the next couple of years — to prop up the city’s coffers until the local economy could get back on its feet.
Doing so gave the city back $60,000, Council Member Jimmy Hallyburton told the City Council in November.
Boise bounced back quickly and was able to bump up city staffers’ pay, Hallyburton said, allowing their wages to rise by an average of 3.4% over five years.
But the city never reverted to giving the city’s leaders 3% hikes, and their salaries gradually fell behind the area’s cost of living, salary adjustments for city staff and the pay of leaders in cities of similar size.
In November, Hallyburton proposed a plan to get city leaders’ pay back on track with the rest of the city’s workers. But after confusion and misstatements about the actual size of the raises proposed, he pivoted, on Tuesday offering an alternate approach that divided the council — and which only moved forward with a tie-breaking vote from Mayor Lauren McLean.