Six-figure Linn County Supervisors need more pay-setting authority

So your Linn County Supervisors are now pulling down six figures.

Take that Polk County, the only other place where supervisors are so well compensated for supervising and such. We're moving on up over here on the east side.

Linn's board voted 3-2 Monday for a fairly modest 2 percent raise during the next budget year, or $1,978.69. That's less than the 3 percent recommended by the county Compensation Board, but more than the 1 percent favored by Supervisors Ben Rogers and Brent Oleson.

Two percent is just enough to boost supervisor paychecks to $100,863.70. Polk supervisors make $104,717, according to the Iowa State Association of Counties.

This was bound to happen, of course, after our supervisors returned to 'full-time” status in 2013, along with a roughly $20,000 pay raise. But I say even an inevitable milestone is worth commemorating.

After all, we're paying for it.

There's not much evidence of public angst, however. Nobody showed up to complain, although it was 9 a.m. on a Monday, post-snow storm. Pay wasn't much of an issue in last fall's county election races. Most of the discussion Monday centered on the merits of Sheriff Brian Gardner's proposed 10.4 percent raise. The board is giving him 6.94 percent, or $8,997.45, instead.

Big bucks aside, what continues to be screwy with county salaries is the role of compensation boards. Unlike cities, salary increases for county elected officials are recommended by a board appointed by those same elected officials.

Recommendations go to the Board of Supervisors. And there are limits on how supervisors can alter them. Supervisors can't give larger raises, and if they want to, say, reduce the recorder's raise, they have to reduce pay for other county officials by the same amount. Supervisors can, thanks to a law change a few years back, cut the size of their own pay raise without slicing pay for other officials.

Byzantine comes to mind. If city councils, or the Legislature, can set their salaries without a board running interference, why not counties?

'I want to see it abolished,” Supervisor Rogers said Monday. Supervisors Linda Langston and John Harris seconded that emotion.

Realistically, that's not likely. Past legislative efforts to scrap comp boards have made little headway. Maybe that changes.

But we can keep compensation boards and still get at the real problem. And the real problem isn't their existence, it's the limits placed on how supervisors can handle their recommendations. If supervisors have the ultimate authority to craft county budgets and set tax levels, they should have power to decide pay issues. In the end, it's the elected board that will take the heat.

That approach would save the best thing about the compensation board process, namely the sort of public salary debate we saw Monday. Without it, you might get something like the city of Cedar Rapids tucking its city manager's pay raise into the consent agenda next to some liquor license renewals.

It's a basic budgetary decision elected supervisors should be free to make. After all, they are pulling down six figures now.

l Comments: (319) 398-8452; todd.dorman@thegazette.com.