Naples advisory panel members criticize proposed pay raises for mayor, council

Editor's Note: This article has been updated to reflect the correct time frame for when Naples officials typically publish committee meeting agendas on the city's website. The agendas are posted three days before each meeting. 

Ahead of a Naples City Council vote Wednesday on the largest one-time pay raises for the mayor and council in at least 40 years, three advisory panel members  criticized the rollout of the salary proposals.

A Naples “Blue Ribbon committee” meets once every four years to consider pay raises for the mayor and council. The panel voted last month to recommend a salary increase for the mayor from $30,000 to $50,000 and an increase for each council member from $23,500 to $40,000.

Those raises, at 67 percent and 70 percent, respectively, would be the highest percentage pay increases for Naples elected officials since 1976, when the mayor and council doubled their salaries to $8,400 and $6,000. The panel last recommended no salary increases when it met in 2013.

More:Naples residents panel recommends big pay raises for mayor, council members

More:Naples Mayor Bill Barnett won't ask for retirement payments but would consider offer

Mayor Bill Barnett and the council will consider the raises during their regular meeting Wednesday.

Before the special panel met last month to consider the pay increases, Naples officials waited too long to provide supporting information to the volunteer committee, said three of the seven panel members.

City Clerk Pat Rambosk and the human resources department did prepare some information on salaries for elected officials in Florida, which the staff shared with panel members three days before the panel met.

On the day before the meeting, after a panel member requested more information, Rambosk sent a more detailed survey of salary data from the Florida League of Cities on roughly 100 municipalities.

Agendas with supporting information for Naples committee meetings typically are prepared and published on the website three days before the meeting, Rambosk said.



The rush of information led to a public rebuke from one panel member.

“This was a flawed process,” David Feight said at the end of the panel’s 90-minute public hearing last month.

Feight also sat on the panel when it last met in 2013.

“We were appointed to this committee several months ago,” he said. “We had no information until this week. … It’s not fair to the council, and it’s not fair to the citizens.”

Other panel members said they were prepared for the meeting or had no trouble doing their own research.

“I don’t care what other people make in other cities,” Thomas Campbell said. “My own independent thought process is these men and women spend countless hours doing what they’re doing, and I don’t want the economics of it to be an impediment for another person or anyone else.”

The proposed $50,000 salary would make the Naples mayor one of the highest-paid among those in similarly structured local governments in Florida, according to the information compiled by the Naples clerk's office.

City Manager Bill Moss said the clerk’s office provided enough information. If the panel needed more time to make a decision, members could have requested another meeting, Moss said.

“While some expressed a concern as to the support materials, they were apparently sufficient for the majority to decide and recommend in one meeting,” he said. “One assumes a second meeting would have been scheduled by the committee if additional information was desired by the majority.”

Moss, in an email to panel members four days before the meeting, had suggested raising the mayor’s salary to as much as $80,000 and the council’s salary to more than $60,000, which the panel rejected.

The panel also rejected his suggestion for creating a retirement package for elected officials who had served at least 20 years in office.

Those proposals were striking to panel member Linda Black, who also sat on the committee in 2013. She recommended the council postpone its vote on the salary increases Wednesday.

“It’s unsettling to think that the council would consider compensation at this time, in the aftermath of (Hurricane) Irma,” Black said. “We’re facing monumental costs.”