The Schizophrenia of the San Antonio Express-News’ Editorial Board
A few weeks ago, the San Antonio Express-News’ editorial board offered that the initial council bump in pay in 2015 was justified on the grounds that the “responsibilities of the city council and the mayor changed and grew” with the city over the preceding decades. However, a “strong argument can be made they should receive six-figure salaries” this year.
Now, in yesterday’s paper, they dial back to the “low end of the Charter Review Commission subcommittee’s preliminary recommendation of between $75,000 and $125,000.”
They believe that is the “sweet spot” because of the “reality of what voters will be willing to accept in November.” They proceed to display their collective math skills by toying with some %s of “San Antonio’s single-individual median income” to arrive at what the mayor and council paychecks would be in certain scenarios.
And that’s it. The reader is deprived of the aforementioned “strong argument.” Is this the reporting arm of the EN, or the op-ed section that ideally should lead community opinion?
In their take a couple weeks ago, they claim the gig is a “50 to 60 hours a week … full-time job.” This justifies a “livable salary.” In our take, we contest this, asking why more council sessions and the most important committee meeting can’t be pushed to the evenings, or even the weekend.
Ironic then that, in their follow-up published yesterday, they say “some suggest … serving on city council is not a full-time job and doesn’t merit full-time pay.” We submitted our piece to them for consideration the day before, March 28th. One wonders who serves as their foil.
And by the way, since when is a six-figure salary merely “livable?” That’s actually closer to comfortable. Even slightly below that “low end” is “livable.” To the extent it’s not, that’s a direct result of elected representatives ‘doing’ so much at city hall that “50 to 60 hours a week” is required. The more they do, the more expensive life gets for the rest of us.
That lends to another bad idea the editorial board has.
A decade ago on the Howard Stern show, a chat with rocker John Mellencamp turned oddly to FDR. He said presidents should be able to run for four terms to “learn his job.” That was an odd take considering it was FDR’s policies that prolonged and deepened the Great Depression.
The EN editorial board strikes a similar tone by recommending “council terms be stretched from two to four years” so they can “settle into their job.” Nowhere do they also suggest cutting the number of eligible terms from four to, say, two.
That they pay lip service to saving taxpayers money by keeping elections concurrent, and that their pay is a fraction of the city’s budget, is merely an amusing afterthought.
They seem to have no qualms about tossing aside the voters’ voice of just six years ago regarding pay and tenure for the city manager. When it comes to council pay however, that “debate played out” a few years prior, and is presumably settled business.
We know the EN doesn’t focus solely on local affairs, and that it needs to attract eyeballs to stay in business. But would it be too much to get some consistency on where the editorial board stands?