No salary increase for city council
During Wednesday night’s Lodi City Council meeting, councilman Shak Khan said he ran for office to help improve not only his district, but the entire community.
That’s why, he said, he placed three items on the agenda addressing council salary increases, no parking signs for street sweeping in the Heritage District, and proactive code enforcement.
Two of his three items — salary increases and improved code enforcement — were rejected, both resulting in 2-2 votes due to Vice Mayor Mikey Hothi’s absence.
“I’m voting no on this and a no on bringing it back,” Mayor Mark Chandler said of salary increases. “I think it’s absolutely tone deaf to our local economy or people who struggle to make ends meet, to see the people that sit up here and vote themselves a raise. And I won’t do it under any circumstances.”
According to Wednesday’s staff report, city council salaries have been $860 a month since 2008, where they remain today.
Staff said council salary is legally eligible for a 70% increase for a total of $1,462 a month.
Khan suggested the council table the item until the next meeting so the vice mayor could provide his thoughts. But with a motion to deny coming from Chandler and councilman Alan Nakanishi, the idea was defeated.
It was similar vote when discussing Khan’s idea for a proactive community improvement model, which would allow the city’s code enforcement officers to actively patrol the city for violations rather than wait for residents to file complaints.
“One thing to keep in mind is that we are not currently staffed or budgeted to be able to accommodate a proactive approach,” city manager Steve Schwabauer told the council. “Our staff, with three (officers), are doing all they can do to deal with the complaint-based model so it requires additional staffing to make this proposal possible.”
Nakanishi said while he admired Khan’s ambition and liked the idea of having code enforcement actively patrol neighborhoods, the city lacked the manpower and finances to execute such a program.
“We’ve had this issue for years and years and years,” he said. “The issue is now we don’t have enough
manpower to do this. It’s easy for us to say lets do this and this ... we don’t have any numbers. It’s hard to get staffing. It’s going to be more complex, take more time.”
Resident Alex Aliferis said blight and code enforcement violations are not only in the Heritage District, but throughout the city. He noted an abandoned vehicle with no tires sitting dormant along Lodi Avenue that has not been moved in weeks, as well as a person living out of an automobile on Holly Street as examples of violations that could be removed if code enforcement officers were patrolling the city.
“A lot of people don’t know who to call if one of their neighbors has junk in their front yard and makes the whole neighborhood look bad,” Aliferis said. “This is an issue that has not been addressed. It’s been trying to be addressed on the east side and we always kind of kick the can down the road. There’s only so much individual citizens can do. They make calls, they get fed up. What’s the use? Nothing is being done.”
Khan said many residents in his district do not want to report their neighbors for code violations every day, and if officers actively patrolled the neighborhoods, they could observe violations and make contact with those responsible.
“We’ve been hearing that we’ve always been understaffed,” he said. “Whatever we bring to the council agenda we always hear that we’re understaffed. But we have to start somewhere. This is our job as elected officials. That’s why people work to get us elected and bring improvements to the community. I think this is going to help.”
Councilman Doug Kuehne said while he knows the city’s budget is “always tight,” Khan brought up a good point that being proactive instead of reactive was a better model.
“It’s not just in his district, its throughout the city where that could be beneficial,” he said.
One thing the council members in attendance did agree on was providing street sweeping notices to residents through their city bills. Khan initially wanted to consider implementing certain “No Parking” times for street sweeping days so the city could actively clean roads and gutters in areas where there are high volumes of parked vehicles.
Public works director Charles Swimley said the city tried implementing “No Parking” times in the Heritage District several years ago. The effort failed, Swimley said, because residents in the neighborhood ultimately ignored the signs.
The council voted 4-0 to place notices of street sweeping days and times in residents’ utility bills.
Schwabauer said he would ask Hothi if he would like to discuss the items at a future meeting. If the vice mayor does not, then Schwabauer said he would not place them on an agenda.
However, Khan can ask that the items be placed on a future agenda.