Too much at once

Is the mayor of Fort Wayne worth $135,000? Short answer: No. An employee's worth depends not on what he wants but on what his employers are willing to pay him. No City Council member in his right mind and planning to seek re-election next year would vote for it, because he knows how the employer -- the voting public -- would react.

Longer answer: How can we determine what a public official is worth? Some will say we must pay a salary high enough to entice "good people" to leave the private sector. That argument fails on several levels. In the private sector, someone is rewarded for productivity, but the government doesn't really produce anything. And people don't enter government service at the mayoral level for the money -- they run for office because they want to be mayor. An extra $30,000 a year isn't going to make the CEOs of major Fort Wayne companies suddenly decide to abandon private enterprise. Finally, a salary in the private sector is used to entice the best from among the available talent, and it can fluctuate accordingly. Whatever salary we award this mayor will also be given to the next mayor, regardless of his or her abilities and performance.

So we really have to judge a public-sector salary using public-sector standards. The mayor's people make a stab at it:

“This $135,000 range really puts the mayor in comparison with other officials,” Perlich said.

The superintendent of Fort Wayne Community Schools is paid $180,000 a year, and the other superintendents make at least $138,000. Other top city and county officials make between $134,000 and $113,000 a year.

But that's just an ego argument. "Hey, I'm as important as those other people; I should be making at least as much as them." How can you equate what a mayor and a sheriff and a school superintendent do and what the jobs should be worth? Each of those jobs has a history and salary-setting boards or mechanisms that weigh factors that cannot be correlated. If you compare like jobs, the Fort Wayne chief executive is the highest-paid mayor in the state, and he even makes more than the governor.

The bottom line is that no one -- in either the private or public sector -- is worth an immediate 30 percent raise unless he or she can demonstrate an extraordinary raising of the bar, having performed the functions of the office far better than previous occupants. Even if the case can be made, we still have the problem that the next occupant, whether a genius or a total moron, gets the same salary.

Salaries of public officials should be raised incrementally, in line with what is going on elsewhere in the community. What the mayor's salary ordinance proposes for City Council members -- roughly a 3 percent raise -- sounds about right for him, too.