Work for it.

Is that what you're going to do?

All right, good evening, everybody.

I'm calling the meeting to order.

It is 6 33 p.m.

We are here in uh conference room 3C for the ad hoc committee.

Um, which is to review a resolution for the elected officials compensation that has been uh proposed.

I am Joe Britton.

I am the chairman of the ad hoc committee.

I have um just for the record, all of the committee members are present.

Um councilman McAllister, Councilman Giordano, Councilwoman Wallace Smith, Councilman Coello, and we have the director of finance as well, um Dan Garrick and from the mayor's office, our economic director for economic director Farley Santos and members ex officio, Councilman Hawley, the majority leader Salvatore, Council President, Buseid, Councilman Chinese, and a few members uh from the public as well.

Um the overview of tonight's meeting.

We are going to the charge is pretty simple.

We're reviewing the draft resolution that was attached to your packets.

We are going to go through the language, uh, which is you know, in the simplest of terms, a compensation structure for our three highest elected offices, the mayor, town clerk, and treasurer, treasure, and we'll go through it, talk about it, make any adjustments if we need to.

Um, we'll talk to finance, um, and we don't have corporation council here, but I think I can handle that from the lawyer side of things and go from there.

Any questions on the game plan for tonight from the committee members?

Hearing none, we will get going.

So uh first, I figured it would be smart for us to just start at the charter and just make sure that we are allowed to do this.

Um so I pulled the language.

Um chapter four of the city charter under the category of mayor, section four-one.

It says the mayor shall be the CEO of the city and shall receive such compensation as shall be fixed by the city council.

I read that as we are allowed to do what we have proposed in front of us, which is a resolution to adjust the compensation.

Um dovetailing on that, same for the town clerk, going to section 2-8.

Quote the town clerk's compensation shall be set by the city council.

Um, so that language I think gives us the charge to at least hit those two offices and treasure, although it's not noted in here.

Um it is a line item in the budget, and the city council being the power of the purse, can adjust that as well.

So I think from a legal perspective, we are wired to discuss and propose something like this.

So I figured we will uh just move to the um proposal itself and why we're doing it.

So councilman McAllister and myself had proposed this letter about four months ago, uh, this pro this uh resolution about four months ago.

Um kind of to put the bottom line up front.

The offices uh the office of the mayor, uh, we feel is pretty undercompensated for the growth of the city, um, especially compared to other municipalities of similar size, um, and even compared to municipalities that are not of similar size that compensate their chief elected um a lot higher than we do.

So the entire idea is to fix that, adjust that, and by way of this resolution, we'll do that, and as a second part of the resolution to index it to COLA, which is the cost of living um adjustment, which goes based pretty much based on uh inflation each year, and tying that all together will uh take the politics out of having to come for a raise every year, and the compensation just goes up with inflation every year.

So that's sort of the intent behind why I submitted the letter alongside councilman McAllister.

Um so I guess I'll open the floor to committee members out of the gate.

Thoughts, questions on that so far.

Councilman McAllister.

Thank you, uh Mr.

Chairman and my Steve colleague from fourth ward.

I think it's pretty obvious.

Um the figures pointed out.

The dynamics of the city of Danbury are just absolutely incredible.

Um it requires someone that has a good grasp on good government, is educated, is intelligent, and in order to maintain that type of environment in the mayor's office, we have to have somebody uh who's gonna be well compensated.

Uh the subsections of this proposal regarding uh the town clerk, city treasurer, etc.

being a portion of that final determination is also important.

Uh good government um requires good employees.

Um starts at the top.

If we don't have somebody good at the top, then I would say people think we'll suffer for in the long run.

I uh 100% support this, which is why I co-signed it with our uh esteemed chairman here, and uh hope that uh we'll find it uh the results are positive.

Thank you, Mr.

Chairman.

Thank you, uh councilman.

Any other committee members at this point before we start getting into the resolution?

Yeah, councilman Jared.

I'm not sure who to address uh it's regarding the chart at the end about the um uh different salaries and uh um the it are you talking, yeah, the list of the other salaries for the other cities.

I I had trouble, you know, corroborating these numbers.

I know they're probably right, and you guys have you know, but that's you know, it just this isn't what comes up when you google it.

So you know I think I just have to trust your uh Yeah, so I'll tell you where I pulled the numbers from.

So I went into the budget books for each municipality and I went to their most recent one, but I actually had to go into each book and scroll to find it.

So if you Google it, you'll probably get um there was an article that came out in 2023 at uh Hearst did it where they went through each municipality, did like a nice write-up of the CEOs, what their salaries are.