Should city councilors be able to give the mayor, themselves pay raises?

After Sioux Falls voters said no to pay raises in 2022, new proposed ballot measure would take compensation levels out of charter

Proposed pay increases for the Sioux Falls mayor and the City Council were rejected at the ballot last year.

But a panel tasked with recommending amendments to the city charter — where compensation levels for elected municipal officials are enshrined — is again talking about pay ahead of city’s 2024 spring election.

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This time, though, the proposal before the Sioux Falls Charter Revision Commission does not call for any wage increases for the mayor and the Council’s eight members. Instead, voters could be asked to consider giving councilors the authority to decide what level of pay they and the mayor deserve — removing compensation levels out of city charter entirely.

“In light of what happened last year when there was a vote to change the dollar amount in the charter … this isn’t an end-run on that,” Charter Revision Commissioner Carl Zylstra said in support of an amendment he’s asking his colleagues to place on next April’s municipal ballot. “As a matter of fact, it doesn’t propose any change in the salary of the mayor or council.”

City charter calls for councilors to earn 15 percent of the mayor’s salary and includes automatic cost of living increases annually — based on the consumer price index. When the charter was adopted in 1995, that was $75,000 for the mayor and about $11,000 for councilors. Today, the mayor’s yearly salary is $150,000 and councilors about $22,000.