It’s not easy being green
Leaders in the public and private sectors are compensated in wildly different ways, and yet in many respects the demands they face from constituents are strikingly similar.
Mayor Sylvester Turner makes $235,000 a year to lead the city of 2.3 million, roughly four times the median income of a city resident. Randall Stephenson, chief executive of Dallas-based AT&T, earned more than $29.1 million last year, more than 300 times the compensation of his average employee.
Now, their jobs are entirely different, so a direct comparison is unfair. After all, Stephenson is judged in large part on his ability to provide a return to shareholders that’s benchmarked in quarterly increments. Turner has to provide services and safety and is held accountable every four years.
In this issue of Texas Inc., we talk to Turner about how he came to lead the nation’s fourthlargest city and we look at the highest-compensated public company executives in the state, having looked at Houston’s last week. And while there are vast distinctions between the two, there was one interesting area of overlap: climate change and the environment.
Turner grew up one of nine children in Acres Homes and said he always wanted to be a lawyer and get into politics. “There was nothing else for me,” he said.
Asked what some of the greatest challenges he faced were, Turner told us that flooding still poses a threat.
“Flood mitigation projects will always be a top priority,” he said. “The storms are coming with greater frequency and intensity. It’s not just the hurricanes. A weather system can turn into 10 inches of rain in a short period of time. So flooding, transportation and public safety — those are all top priorities.”
At the same time, corporate executives like Stephenson are facing pressure from shareholders to take steps to address their company’s environmental footprints.
Reporter Erin Douglas, in her breakdown of the pay packages of the state’s best-compensated chief executives at Texas public companies, looked at pressure boards face to pursue environmental, social and governance – ESG — reforms as they look to social responsibility as well as quarterly earnings as a way to benchmark progress.
So far, Douglas found, “environmental and social shareholder proposals have rarely gained majorities — Exxon Mobil shareholders this year rejected climate-related resolutions — but including such issues in measures of corporate and executive performance is gaining adherents. Support for environmental and social shareholder proposals among voting investors increased to 24 percent in 2018 from 6 percent in 2000.”
The confluence is inevitable — shareholders are residents of communities affected by new environmental imperatives and businesses are corporate citizens of cities and states whose infrastructure and workforces are likewise impacted.
The answers may not yet be clear, but the common interest in solutions is becoming increasingly apparent.
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