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Struthers council mulls restoring pay cuts
By jeanne starmack
struthers
Council is expected to consider legislation tonight to restore large pay cuts the mayor and the city auditor took in 2008, and that has upset some city employees.
The salary boosts will amount to around $18,000 — $10,000 for auditor Tina Morell and $8,000 for Mayor Terry Stocker. If council passes the legislation, the cuts will be restored in increments of thirds over the next three years.
As incoming mayor, Stocker saw his pay cut from outgoing mayor Dan Mamula’s salary of $41,470 to $33,904; Morell, who was starting her second 4-year term, saw her pay cut from $47,380 to $37,904.
The salaries were cut at a council meeting in December 2007. Council members said at the time that Stocker did not have the experience Mamula had and there had been talk all along of reverting to a base salary for the mayor, according to Vindicator files.
They were harsh with Morell. Then-council- member Mark Sandine said in a letter added to the meeting agenda that she would not cooperate with directives, and he questioned her abilities.
He added that he believed the best way to deal with the situation was to “adjust her salary.” Stocker and Robert Burnside, council’s present finance and legislation committee chairman, both characterized the cuts as a vindictive action by council members who’d lost their bid for re-election and who’d supported Mamula. Mamula had been mayor for 16 years before Stocker beat him in the May 2007 election. Morell had supported Stocker, Stocker pointed out.
Morell called the cuts “punitive” earlier this week, adding that the salary boosts are not raises, but a restoration.
“A lot of people in the city are considering it a raise, but it really isn’t,” Burnside said Tuesday. “It’s a wrong this council is trying to make right,” he said.
Stocker had 18 years’ experience on council before becoming mayor, Burnside said. He also said the allegations against Morell were wrong and that she’d had a balanced budget.
Stocker and Morell wrote letters to council to make their cases for restoring the cuts.
Burnside said he had recommended that the two send the letters. He said council discussed restoring the cuts two weeks ago in an executive meeting that was closed to the public.
Morell said that in her letter, she did not make a case for restoring her own salary.
“This isn’t about me, it’s about the position of auditor,” she said, adding that she is making what the city auditor made in 1997. She did not want to comment further.
Stocker said in his letter that every official in the city’s history had the entitlements of their predecessors, except for him and Morell.
But the move to restore the salaries are not well- received by many city employees, said Brian Hallquist, president of Struthers International Association of Firefighters Local 1910.
“[The fire department] just signed a three-year contract — they stated they had no money for raises, and we took a three-year pay freeze,” Hallquist said Tuesday.
“We took health-care concessions,” he added. “There’s a lot of sore feelings,” he said. “They told us not even a month-and-a-half ago there’s no money.”
He also said the police and fire departments are understaffed by one person each. Stocker said he intends to look at staffing for those departments closely.
Jason Murzda, president of Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 41, said his union believes that now is not the time to restore the salaries. “We haven’t had an increase in going on five years and we’re down an officer,” he said.