11/15/07 - New salary proposal for officials

The county Legislature recommends lowering election commisioner pay

(As published by Cortland Standard, Evan Geibel reporting)

The county Legislature’s Personnel Committee recommended a new salary for election commissioners this morning, but will continue discussing whether to prohibit the commissioners from serving simultaneously as the chairs of their respective parties.

Local Law No. 2 for 2007, which would set the salaries for both commissioners at $27,176 in 2008, will next go before the Budget and Finance Committee for consideration.

Meanwhile, the Personnel Committee decided that including a prohibition limiting who could serve as election commissioner would be more appropriate within an ethics law, following the advice of the county administrator.

Legislator Don Spaulding (D-6th Ward) was the only Personnel Committee member to vote against the salary and he had proposed something closer to $15,000 at the beginning of the discussion.

“I think we’re going too fast on this,” Spaulding worried, nevertheless acknowledging that the Legislature would have to approve the law before Jan. 1 in order for it to take effect. “I still think that ($27,176) is too high to pay an election commissioner and I won’t support it.”

Legislature Chairwoman Marilyn Brown said she agreed the salary was too high but Brown and other committee members felt comfortable with basing the salary on the system that had been used to set the salaries for election commissioners in the past.

County Administrator Scott Schrader said that in 2004, he asked the sitting election commissioners to fill out a survey documenting the time they spent working in the position over the course of a month in the early spring.

Schrader said the surveys indicated election commissioners spent about 75 percent of a workday attending to their county duties. That portion was then applied to the pay grade of comparable positions in the county — grade 10, which includes the clerk of the Legislature and the director of fire and emergency management — to arrive at the salary.