Riviera votes to end individual $12,000 stipends for council
RIVIERA BEACH — Riviera Beach City Council members, who give themselves the biggest car and travel allowances in the state along with a stipend in addition to their salary to oversee the city water department, have rescinded one of those perks — the $12,000 annual individual stipend.
They voted Monday to drop the perk, effective immediately, after several months of negative publicity over their spending and management of the poverty-riddled city. The stipend, enacted in 2015 for the five council members and the mayor, was one of several examples of extraordinary spending documented by The Palm Beach Post in articles last fall.
Council member KaShamba
Miller-Anderson, the only member to vote against the extra cash in 2015, repeatedly has sought to rescind it since then, a move accomplished Monday with the help of new member Julie Botel, who made the motion for the change. The other members,
Chairwoman Tonya Davis Johnson, Terence Davis and Lynne Hubbard, joined in, making the vote unanimous.
Including Social Security and retirement deductions, the change saves city taxpayers $110,000 a year, according to Botel, who said she was “thrilled” by the outcome.
“It was not being justified by the amount of time we were spending,” Miller-Anderson said of the stipend.
Acting as the board of the city’s Utility District, a majority of the council members voted to enact the stipend Sept. 2, 2015. The justification then was, they would be spending a lot of time at the monthly board meeting of the beleaguered waterworks but legally couldn’t give themselves a salary increase without voter approval. But they could give themselves a stipend.
The change comes two months after a municipal election changed the board’s political balance, by ousting incumbent Dawn Pardo and adding Botel, by an 80-20 landslide.
But the vote didn’t come without resistance and took two meetings.
At the Utility District’s meeting March 26, Miller-Anderson confronted her colleagues with research showing how little time they had spent at district meetings.
Since the stipend was enacted, there were 31 district meetings, she said. Fifteen of them lasted less than an hour, six less than 30 minutes and one was only five minutes, she said. And more than one-third of the meetings were on days when the members were together for council meetings, she said.
She noted that Terence Davis, the only other current board member who participated in the original vote, said he was voting for the stipend only on a temporary basis, for as long as it could be shown it required heavy lifting. The numbers she presented showed it did not, Miller-Anderson said.
Terence Davis hoisted a loose-leaf binder six inches thick and countered that the members’ utility oversight required a heavy load of reading and responsibility for $240 million of needed capital improvements. And before deciding on the stipend, he said, the board should have the interim city manager, new utility director and finance director submit a report on the meetings and the work involved, rather than relying on Miller-Anderson’s research.
He and Hubbard, an ally on the board, also said they used stipend money for charitable causes. Hubbard also noted that, although council members get a council salary and Utility District stipend, they don’t get paid for their work as the board of the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency.
An issue also was raised as to whether, under state laws that govern meeting procedures, the current board could undo a previous board’s action, without having a motion made by someone who previously voted for it.
By Monday, however, the city attorney acknowledged that the current board could indeed vote to rescind the stipend. With little further discussion, Botel made the motion, Miller-Anderson seconded it and all five voted “yea.”