Jessie Stensland reports from Island County for the Whidbey News-Times.
Island County commissioners aren’t able to give themselves raises after all.
On Thursday, Commissioner Melanie Bacon confirmed that the board is going to rescind a resolution, adopted on Tuesday, which changes salary rates for county elected officials. The problem is that an element of the measure violates the state constitution.
Specifically, the constitution prohibits elected officials from increasing their own salaries after an election; the resolution set the raises for commissioners in District 1 and 2, who just won reelection, to go into effect in the new year.
The commissioners could simply change a couple of dates and redo the resolution, but they haven’t decided what action to take.
They Said It
On Thursday, Bacon and Commissioner Jill Johnson said they trusted the staff to present the right information and so they didn’t research the issue themselves. Bacon said she was also under a mistaken impression, from discussions with staff, that raises for other elected officials had to wait until the officials’ next term in office to go into effect. In fact, they can go into effect immediately.
In an interview, Island County Prosecutor Greg Banks said he couldn’t discuss the resolution specifically, but he did explain the law in general terms. The framers of the state constitution, he said, wanted to make sure that elected officials didn’t use their authority to set their own salaries.
Banks explained that state government was much simpler when it was originally written. In current county government, for example, he and all the other elected officials, except commissioners, have no ability to increase their own salaries; budget decisions are made by the county commissioners.
