Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg should kill a fat pay raise for City Manager Howard Chan | Opinion

Sacramento City Manager Howard Chan did the right thing Tuesday night. The highest paid city manager in California asked to delay a City Council vote on a proposal to give him a 5% raise and 10 weeks of vacation. The tone deaf and irresponsible windfall bankrolled by taxpayers would have raised Chan’s annual compensation to potentially more than half a million dollars.

Chan should now take the appropriate next step by asking the council to drop this issue entirely because he is already paid more than anyone doing his job in California.

Yet Chan himself set all of this in motion by placing on the council agenda a proposal that would raise his pay and that of his fellow charter officers by the same 5%. That would make Chan’s base pay $420,664.33.

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But that was not enough. The proposal included an additional perk solely for Chan, to increase his vacation leave account by an astonishing 240 hours. That was worth more than $48,000 since his contract allows him to cash in unused leave. As a 21-year city employee, he already receives four weeks of leave and another 13 paid holidays.

Chan has clearly gotten accustomed to getting this special treatment without consequence. This raise would have resulted in a 60% increase in his pay during his six years on the top job.

Before Tuesday’s meeting, Chan’s raise seemed like a fait accompli but then suddenly a done deal wasn’t done at all.

Its undoing was the right move because the allure of dollar signs and political expediency will surely backfire on Chan and Mayor Darrell Steinberg if this behavior continues. There are already signs of trouble as some city employees rightly questioned why Chan deserves his own special deal when the city budget is stretched thin.

“My members are frustrated,” said Timothy Davis, the president of the Sacramento Police Officers Association. His union’s contract expired in March. “The council has only met twice in the last six months to discuss bargaining with all of its members. We need to focus first on rank-and-file employees getting them under contract.”

Steinberg tried unsuccessfully to put a happy face on this situation when, in fact, he and Chan miscalculated the impact of this salary grab.

“The city manager just made a decision to continue the item, including potential salary adjustments,” Steinberg said at the meeting. “In my opinion as mayor, what we just witnessed was an act of leadership.”

In the twilight of his tenure in Sacramento, Steinberg is seeking to ask Sacramento County voters in November 2024 to increase sales taxes to improve housing and transportation. Any sales tax increase would have a disproportionate impact on the most economically stressed residents of the county.

This proposal follows three failed efforts. There will be a high bar for any proposal to succeed. And it will require all local governments to demonstrate that they are careful stewards of existing funds.

Steinberg is in danger of eroding his own credibility if he continues to champion another special compensation deal for Chan, particularly one that includes nearly three months of paid time off. That is not leadership or financial stewardship by either the city manager or the mayor. This jig is up.

Steinberg is one of the region’s most accomplished politicians, but when it comes to Chan, he seems to routinely lose his compass. Raising Chan’s compensation to his desired level makes Steinberg look disconnected from political reality at a time when he is trying to make the most of his last year in office.

Meanwhile, there are unfinished labor negotiations at City Hall and a worsening homeless crisis to contend with in Sacramento. As a result of a previous council decision, it has fallen to Chan to turn the tide and identify “safe ground” encampment sites where homeless people can be relocated.

Steinberg said at the time of the vote that he wanted Chan to act within 30 to 60 days. That would be a tough deadline to meet if Chan were to take all that proposed vacation time.

There is real work to be done. And there is no room for extravagant compensation perks funded by taxpayers. Hopefully, Steinberg and Chan finally got the memo.