HomeMy WebLinkAbout06-18-26 Public Comment - Gallatin Valley Sentinel - Comments on 6_18 Draft - CompensationFrom:The Gallatin Valley Sentinel
To:Bozeman Goverment Study Commission
Subject:[EXTERNAL]Comments on 6/18 Draft - Compensation
Date:Thursday, June 18, 2026 10:36:50 AM
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To the Bozeman Study Commission:
Please see the comments below on Section 2.04 of the draft charter (Compensation;
Expenses).
If the goal of the new Compensation Board is to remove the inherent conflict and
appearance of self-dealing (and at the very least, awkwardness) of the City Commissiondetermining their own pay, then the board should only consist of four or five Bozeman
residents who are registered voters and live full-time (are domiciled) in the city. Noelected officials should be sitting on the board that determines their compensation.
The CFO should be a non-voting, ex-officio member of the board, similar to MikeMaas's role on the Study Commission. Their role would then be to provide information
on the city's finances, and how the proposed pay fits into the budget. The CFO may not feel comfortable actually voting on commission pay. While they do
not report directly to the commission, they do report directly to the city manager whoreports to the commission, and you would not want to set up a situation where the
current or future CFO feels pressured to vote the same way as the two commissionersyou've proposed to sit on the board.
It should also be up to the board to determine the formula for pay. This could be statedas simply as, "The Compensation Board shall convene annually to assess and determine
compensation for Commissioners and the Mayor."AMI fluctuates from year-to-year, both up and down. Does this mean that commission
pay will fluctuate up and down from year-to-year?By tying the compensation to "an appropriate percentage of a full-time equivalent of the
Gallatin County AMI," the text suggests that commissioners and the mayor will be paidthe same if they work the same number of hours each week.
AMI doesn't actually have anything to do with the job. AMI has no logical connectionto what a city commissioner's job is worth.
As Bozeman aims to bring in higher-paying tech jobs, AMI will inevitably go up, whichmeans that commissioner pay would rise based on market forces entirely unrelated to
the job itself or how well it's being performed. The question remains why compensation would be tied to the area median income for a
household of four, as opposed to a household of one, as this is arbitrary.One of the Study Commissioners said in a recent meeting that if the commissioner did
not have a household of four, then the pay would be adjusted based on family size. Thismeans you would be paying people differently for doing the exact same job, which
violates the principle of equal pay for equal work, meaning that pay is tied to the job,not to the personal life or attributes of the person doing it.
Please adopt simpler, less prescriptive language for the Compensation board, changing themembers of the board to 4-5 residents plus the CFO as an ex-officio member, and removing
the prescriptive formula and replacing it with language like,"The Compensation Board shallconvene annually to assess and determine compensation for Commissioners and the Mayor."
Thank you,
Katie AdamsThe Gallatin Valley Sentinel