Tacoma City Council looks tone deaf to crisis

The Great Recession seems to have taken a holiday at Tacoma City Hall. The City Council is poised to do something unheard of these days: Give its city manager a beefy 14.5 percent raise.

The nearly $30,000 cost is budget dust compared to the additional $4.5 million the city will begin shelling out Friday to hundreds of city employees whose pay was found to be “below market.”

Those raises were adopted in early December based on the premise that employee retention was a problem. The evidence was shaky then, and the claim that the city can’t hold on to workers is more dubious today.

It’s hard to imagine in this market anyone having trouble recruiting and retaining for secure jobs that provide generous health care and other benefits, and that rarest of all perks, a pension.

While Tacoma works to make city employment even more attractive, workers elsewhere are facing pay cuts, unpaid furloughs and the elimination of retirement benefits. That’s if they’re lucky enough to not be killing time in unemployment lines.

Against that backdrop, Tacoma city leaders appear to be living in an alternate universe. City staff were prepared to pay another $300,000 to a consultant who helps organize employee meetings until the council called whoa. Now it’s the council looking like it’s operating on autopilot.

Council members know the city manager’s raise won’t be popular with the public, but they apparently feel duty bound to give the manager his due after employees got theirs.

Mayor Bill Baarsma told council members, “There’s a rationale behind it that you can argue if people ask, even if they won’t buy it.”

Citizens won’t buy that line of reasoning and here’s why: Assumptions and usual ways of doing business are out the window in this economy.

Just ask the state employee groups who thought they had a lock on cost-of-living increases since they negotiated them with Gov. Chris Gregoire herself. Late last year, the governor took back her offer, refusing to forward the contracts to the Legislature.

Likewise, Washington State University President Elson Floyd didn’t volunteer for a $100,000 pay cut because the savings will make a dent in the university’s overall budget. He did it because it sent a message.

City Manager Eric Anderson plans to donate half of his raise to charity. Good for him, but that doesn’t make council members look any less tone deaf. Have they heard of the expression, “We feel your pain?” Do they get the concept of a symbolic gesture?

Better yet, what happened to exercising an abundance of caution when staring down the greatest economic contraction since the Great Depression? The bottom is falling out of Pierce County’s budget; can Tacoma be far behind?

This is not about what Anderson is worth – just as the 6,900 pink slips Pierce County employers issued in January alone had nothing to do with whether those workers deserved to keep their jobs.

This is about government proving it’s not out of touch.