Knox County commissioners' future pay increases will be determined by the state legislature, just like many other Tennessee elected officials.
Commissioners unanimously voted Oct. 26 to make the change and they'll take a procedural second vote Nov. 16.
The vote ended a monthslong debate that started when the commission unexpectedly cut $4 million from the Knox County Schools budget to pay for raises for county employees outside the school district. The move pitted elected officials against each other and sparked discussions about who should determine commissioners' pay.
In June, commissioners – including four people who are no longer on the board – doubled pay raises for county staffers from a budgeted 3% to 6%. The cost of living in Knox County
is going up, they said, and salaries for sheriff's deputies and service workers should reflect that.
But that meant commissioners' own salaries automatically went up from $28,194.52 to $29,875.56 because their raises are tied to those received by county workers.
Mayor Betsy Henderson, then a school board member, argued politicians shouldn't get to determine their own pay. Commissioner Brandon Huckaby agreed, and after her own plan to change the system stumbled out of the gate, Henderson signed on to Huckaby's idea to allow the state determine how much salaries change from year to year.
“I have said all along that politicians should not give themselves pay raises," Henderson said in a Sept. 18 statement. "I am proposing an ordinance that would tie commissioners’ and school board members’ pay adjustments to the same state certified formula used for other elected officials. This will create a clear standard that holds politicians accountable while removing conflicts of interests and self-dealing.”
Commissioners and other elected officials got raises from the mayor and state legislature, respectively, every year over the past five years. But the amounts differed. Over the past five years, both the commissioners and the other elected officials received an average raise of 4%.
Some commissioners said tying their pay raises to state rules could create a scenario where their pay goes up more than county employees' pay, while that would be impossible with the current method where they're all in the same boat.
Knox County Chief Financial Officer Chris Caldwell said the finance department, which manages the budget for commissioners' salaries, didn't have a preference for how raises were decided.
"There are years when the mayor, the property assessor, the register of deeds get ridiculed because they're getting a bigger raise than their employees," Caldwell said Oct. 19, describing what could happen if commissioners tie their pay to the state and county employees receive smaller raises. "They can't fix that. It's dictated by the state."
Still, Caldwell said, there may be something to the decision being out of commissioners' hands altogether.
"If I was a commissioner, taking my ability to vote on my own pay out of my hands would give me piece of mind," Caldwell said. "I could look at my constituents and say 'it's set by the state. We chose this as a body.''
Allie Feinberg is the politics reporter for Knox News. Email: allie.feinberg@knoxnews.com; Reddit: u/KnoxNewsAllie
This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Knox County commissioners take a new hands-off approach to their own salaries
