City struggles to explain origins of longevity pay for elected officials

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Do elected officials deserve an extra boost in their pay when they have been in office for decades?

That’s the question that has occupied New Bedford city government for months now in the wake of Mayor Jon Mitchell suddenly putting an end to the practice late last year, after the city’s payroll office out of the blue is said to have questioned it.

I’m not sure why Payroll would suddenly question a practice that had been going on in New Bedford at least since the late Mayor Fred Kalisz first became a city councilor in the early 1990s. But that’s the story coming out of the current mayor’s office. Maybe it has something to do with what Payroll had heard about the mayor of Everett getting $40,000 a year in longevity pay instead of the $10,000 he was entitled to.

No one in New Bedford city government seems to know when the practice of paying elected officials for, er … getting re-elected started, and believe me, I have tried to find out. I’ve been all over the office of the City Council, mayor, chief financial officer and the public library stacks trying to track it down.

Mayor Mitchell says the city is also trying to track it back by way of payroll records as far as it can go back but that municipalities don’t keep records indefinitely. 

“I suspect we won’t know when it started,” he told WBSM’s talk host Chris McCarthy on his July 16 show. “The city, like any organization, doesn’t retain its records in perpetuity.”

It’s too bad if it doesn’t keep those records, which is certainly possible in a digital age. 

In an era obsessed by conspiracies the public deserves to know whether New Bedford elected officials decided they would get this benefit, or whether an appointed official did it on his or her own. It’s hard to believe the latter, unless it was in cooperation with elected officials. 

The elected officials in New Bedford, after all, do receive both health care benefits and pensions after 10 years of being re-elected. They receive those perks on the premise that they are city employees like any other employee.

City officials can tell you that city union members have been getting longevity pay benefits since the mid-1970s. And they can tell you that the city passed an ordinance in 1989 formally extending the benefit to managers and professional workers. But they can’t tell you when it all started for elected guys and gals.

You can track down the city budget books in 1984 and see a line for “longevity and sick pay” but you can’t tell exactly which workers were getting it and which were not.

The same day in 1989 when the council passed the longevity pay for the Unit C employees — non-union managers and professional workers — they also passed an ordinance giving the mayor and City Council a 10% raise. Was the longevity pay part of that? I don’t know. I haven’t seen the motion, but the city’s public information officer, Jon Darling, told me that the elected officials pay is on the scale of Unit C longevity pay, not that of any of the unions.

So why does the fact that elected officials receive longevity pay rub so many of us the wrong way? 

So unpopular is the idea of giving elected officials the longevity kiss that when outgoing Councilor Linda Morad floated the idea of overriding the mayor with an ordinance that would legally bestow the money, the idea quickly fizzled, even with the councilors. 

Freshman Councilor Leo Choquette promptly went to Mr. McCarthy with the plan and the talk jock framed the issue as emblematic of politicians taking advantage of the taxpayers. Even though the amount of money involved is a tiny part of the city’s annual half a billion dollar budget, it just didn’t seem to sit right with many.

Still, anyone who knows the New Bedford city councilors knows that some of them have worked very hard. And for many years. Others not so much. But all of the councilors have to put at least some time in. All sorts of people in this world are paid for putting time in, so what’s the big whoop?

I could be wrong, but I think it’s connected to the fact that in a blue-collar place like New Bedford, longevity pay is a benefit that’s never seen this side of a fish house or stitching factory. Never mind the service economy jobs that seem to make up the second and third gigs of so many New Bedford residents trying to make ends meet.

So the longevity pay issue is not just about giving the money to the elected officials. It’s about giving this benefit to city workers in general. The fact the politicians are getting it is just the final straw.

The mayor says the argument in favor of longevity pay is that it helps an organization retain valued employees who have important experience. The counter-argument is to reward employees with performance raises only when they deserve them.

The problem with doing something special for all the city government workers may be that eventually the favor tends to get out of hand.

So it is that after weeks of storm and stress about this longevity stuff, I discovered that many of the city unions are actually getting much bigger longevity payments than the elected officials.

The mayor, city councilors, and city assessors’ longevity pay was based on Unit C. They earned anywhere from a low of $450 a year in longevity compensation to a high of $850 a year depending on how many years they  worked.

But the police union, the city’s strongest union, has had a low of $1,000 a year for longevity pay and a high of $2,500 all the way back to 2014.

After the police won that benefit, the other unions eventually followed suit.

As of July 1, 2022, the firefighters union saw their annual longevity pay increase from $450 at the low end of accumulated years to $1,000, and from $850 to $2,500 at the high end of years. The AFSCME union, which represents clerical workers, laborers, and emergency workers, has a low of $450 and a high up to $1,050.

What the unions earn in terms of benefits, the managers and professionals who work in the non-unionized Unit C eventually end up earning. Perhaps more to the point, what the managers and professionals win in terms of benefits eventually ends up being given to the elected officials. That is, until Mayor Mitchell put an end to it last year at Christmastime. 

That’s right, the longevity checks come out each year a couple weeks before the holiday, a kind of annual Christmas bonus.

The Mitchell administration says that after the Payroll department finally questioned whether elected officials should be receiving the money, City Solicitor Eric Jaikes researched it on the spot. Jaikes said he couldn’t find anything in the city’s ordinances allowing the pay for politicos, and so Mitchell axed it. He did that even though scores of elected officials had been receiving the money for decades, and the mayor had received the money for two years himself without realizing he was getting it, or caring about it if he did know. To be fair to the mayor, who looks at their paycheck every week in these days of online payments?

Fast forward to April and the mayor says that for the first time in his 13 years in the Corner Office, he decided to take the cost-of-living increases in his annual salary. He was examining his yearly salary records when he saw the $450 payment that he was entitled to in a couple of his annual salaries and asked what it was. After he found out what it was, he paid the $900 back for the two years he’d received it, as have City Councilors Joe Lopes and Naomi Carney now paid back their own longevity pay.

The highest earner of longevity pay on the City Council, Brian Gomes, has received approaching $4,000 the last six years (which is the time payments the mayor is trying to recoup). Gomes has been in office 30-plus years, much longer than anyone else on the council. 

For his part, Gomes vociferously denounced the whole longevity issue on the council floor several weeks ago, saying he’d done nothing wrong. And in his defense, why would a councilor question a benefit if he’d been told he was entitled to it? But told by whom? Who got it all started?

Longevity pay, by the way, is a gift that keeps on giving. 

Unlike overtime pay, longevity pay is added to the three highest years of an employee’s salary and added to the amount that determines the pension. So it continues to boost income for the length of a person’s life.

You may say that the pension amounts are modest when it comes to an individual employee, and they certainly are. But again, they are a benefit largely not available to the private-sector employees who labor in one, two and three jobs in a blue-collar city like New Bedford. 

And for argument’s sake, say that half of the city’s 4,000 employees have worked over 10 years and are entitled to longevity pay. If you then apply the benefit to 2,000 of the city’s 4,000 employees, you’re beginning to talk about real money. 

For example, if you take the $4,050 figure that New Bedford Light reporter Colin Hogan calculated for the seven councilors who received longevity pay in 2023, imagine what it would cost the city if roughly 2,000 employees received that amount of longevity pay. That would be a bill to property taxpayers of more than $1 million a year. And that’s at the lower Unit C/City council longevity rate.

As I said, people who work in places like seafood houses and stitching factories, or labor as nursing assistants or landscapers tend not to get longevity pay, at Christmas or any other time.

Maybe they could apply for a job at City Hall. Or run for office.

Jack Spillane is an opinion columnist for The New Bedford Light.

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