Sacramento City Council on Tuesday will discuss extending City Manager Howard Chan’s contract for another year.
The council was set to discuss the contract during last week’s meeting, but unanimously voted to bump it to next week. Incoming Mayor Kevin McCarty said last week’s meeting should instead focus on celebrating new leadership that was sworn in that night.
Chan’s employment agreement contract is set to expire on Dec. 31. According to a staff report, no other changes to the contract have been incorporated into the amendment.
Last December, the council violated the Brown Act when it approved several executives’ pay increases, including Chan’s, during a special meeting.
Public outcry over the raises, which would have increased Chan’s salary to $420,000 without benefits, led the council in January to revoke the city manager’s power to put raises for themself on meeting agendas. Chan did not receive the $20,000 raise and his base salary remained unchanged at $400,000 without benefits.
The unanimous decision also changed one of the council’s rules. Now, the power to recommend pay adjustments for Sacramento’s city manager and other executives belongs to the mayor or the Personnel and Public Employees Committee.
Data from the California State Controller showed that Chan was the second-highest-paid City Manager in California, making nearly $600,000 — roughly $310 an hour —in total wages with benefits in 2023, which is roughly $40,000 less than the state’s highest-paid city manager.
Sacramento was also one of the only California cities with high populations in 2023 to pay their city manager more than their population size.
When asked about the city manager’s role on his last day as Mayor, Darell Steinberg told CapRadio that he believes the weak mayor system the city operates under doesn’t give the mayor enough authority as an elected official.
“If we’re not going to go back to strong mayor, which is a bad term, by the way, maybe we ought to think about something like having a mayor hire the city manager subject to ratification by the council and only allow the mayor to fire the city manager subject to the overturning by the city council,” he said. “What that would do is keep the mayor on the council still one of nine, no great power, but have the manager respond around implementation to one person instead of nine.”
Steinberg argued that the need to respond to nine people on the council creates “the chaos and the challenges in implementation.”
“I hope that even though [a] strong mayor probably should never be back in the way that I tried or that Mayor Johnson tried, that the city does not give up on trying to reform our growing city,” he added. “And our growing city I think requires that its mayor, and it won’t be me, with all that accountability, have at least a little bit more authority.”
Council members are expected to discuss the contract at their 5 p.m. meeting. It is the only item on the agenda.
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