Columbus City Council members commended the city administrator for her work after her pay became a topic of public comment during a recent meeting.
The City of Columbus’ Sept. 30 budget deadline is approaching and this has been the predominant theme at meetings this month.
On Sept. 5, the council meeting started with a public hearing on the one- and six-year road plans, which saw no public comment. Within that plan lies 10 projects, seven for the city and three private. It was accepted.
In the following Committee of the Whole reports, the pay plan for 2023-2024 pay increases was brought up which prompted some public comments, though discussion topics strayed from the necessity and scale at which the pay scale was shifting.
Comments particularly pertained to City Administrator Tara Vasicek’s salary increase of $6,804 for the year, going from $226,800 to $233,604.
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“When she was appointed in 2017, she started at $150,000 so by my math — she’s going to be somewhere north of $233,000 — that’s a $266 a week raise every week since she’s been here the last six years,” said Anthony Smith, a resident in attendance. “How can you possibly justify that? I think it’s insane. There’s no way the cost of living in Columbus is that much.”
Smith, representing his website Platte Valley Media Group, said afterward that he believes the increase is too much for someone of Vasicek’s tenure and position. Smith referred to an article posted by the city on Aug. 29 about Vasicek, her job and prior experience in the city of York in the same position.
Smith said that, while the article accurately portrayed salaries of city administrators across Nebraska, Vasicek doesn’t measure up to their qualifications and therefore should not be paid in the same range.
“Those city administrators have double or triple the experience along with a formal finance degree. Tara doesn’t fall into that category,” Smith said. “I know a lot of other people think it’s way too much money for her being, in my opinion, underqualified and not possessing a formal finance degree and the fact she’s in charge of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of Columbus residents’ tax money, I think it’s inappropriate to pay her that much.”
The rate of increase, Smith said during the meeting, has climbed a few times over the years, which, given the cost of living in Columbus, he believes is unjustified in terms of quantity in the case of the city administration.
Vasicek said after the meeting that when she was initially contracted in 2017, her starting pay of $150,000 was based off of a comparability analysis of other cities’ similar positions. Every year since then, her salary has increased the same as every other city employee for a cost-of-living adjustment, based off of the economy from the previous year. The city council elected for her to receive a merit-based increase one year in addition to the annual adjustment, but that was a one-off event, Vasicek said.
“Since way before I was in Columbus, the city council has always taken the consolidated consumer price index from June of the last year to June of the current year and whatever the adjustment was, they try their best to meet that,” Vasicek said. “June last year to June this year was like a 2.97% change and I presented 2.5% and 3% and they elected 3%.”
As to her qualifications, Vasicek has a degree in community and regional planning, but did pursue a graduate degree in public administration at one point. Trying to do her regular job and raise a family, that post-graduate education simply wasn’t a sustainable option, she said. Given a choice of the three, she chose to leave school and continue with her work.
Two other Columbus residents, Joyce Heins and Michael Jones, came forward to voice similar concerns to Smith’s and were met with similar responses. Heins said her main concern was regarding the impact on taxpayers for what she perceived to be not enough results.
Third Ward Council Member Ron Schilling told Heins that she should come in and see for herself, as he believed it would justify that 3% increase they were voting on for all city employees.
“What you need to do is come in and find out the type of work she does do and then maybe you’ll understand a little more what her position is,” Schilling said. “What she does, she takes care of every facet of this city and there’s about 20 different avenues she’s got to deal with on a daily basis.”
Vasicek said after the meeting she is in a unique situation where some perceive her to have more power than she does and at the same time, she does more on a daily basis than most people know.
Smith and Jones touched on a couple of other issues they were concerned about, related to Vasicek but not to the issue at hand, such as the police and fire department’s reposts of city announcements and articles on social media. City officials asked them to stick to the topic of the pay plan for public comments at that time.
Mayor Jim Bulkley responded at the time that the social media concern was up to the discretion of the fire and police departments’ chiefs and that he trusts them to do what they believe is best. Smith said after that he wished there was more opportunity to discuss those topics.
Smith said this isn’t about Vasicek herself and shouldn’t be seen as anything against her. Rather, he is concerned, as a citizen of Columbus, about spending and the level of discussion at city council meetings surrounding many topics. Vasicek’s salary increase was just one of those items and he thought it was necessary to bring it up.
“What I want is city leaders to be held accountable. I want to cut wasteful spending. I want better discussions amongst the city council members and really, that’s really it. I think it’s a pretty simple request,” Smith said.
The pay plan was passed 7-1 with the one nay coming from Hope Freshour.
Freshour elaborated in a press release after the meeting why she voted nay. While she supports Vasicek’s pay being a higher rate and the 3% raise for city employees, she was not so much in favor of that increase seeming so dramatically higher with a higher salary.
“What I took issue with is a blanket raise of 3% across the board for someone making $20 an hour is a lot different than a higher-level paid position,” Freshour said in the press release.
In addition to the pay plan, the Capital Improvement Plan was also on the agenda and voted in. This, Vasicek said, was a little different this year as it was split into discretionary and non-discretionary projects, as decided by the city council and mayor, for the sake of prioritizing spending.
“This year, I asked that discretionary and non-discretionary be separate. Discretionary is things that would be nice. Non-discretionary means it needs to be done,” Vasicek said.
The projects were given by department heads to elected officials and ranked, Vasicek said, with discretionary items being put on the bottom of the list.
“The purpose of the discretionary capital improvement projects is that elected officials now sponsor those discretionary projects. Staff are here to do the work. We’re not here to sell the projects. We shouldn’t be here to sell the projects, really go to bat for the projects,” Vasicek said. “We’re here to represent the will of the people and represent the will of the council.”
Vasicek said with her involvement in all of the city’s projects, there is some perception that she is fighting for certain initiatives, but all she does is what the public tells their representatives to do.
In that way, she said, she walks a fine line between coordinating communication between 20-some government channels, the public, city officials and the outside parties they may bring in on contract, while it may seem as if all she does is present agenda items to the city council.
“I don’t do anything that isn’t in the budget, that isn’t a city policy. I can’t build a building like this (Columbus Community Building) that’s not voter-approved. I can’t do anything that’s not council-approved, voter-approved or in budget, all those things are council,” Vasicek said. “I’m just the staff getting the council’s vision to life.”
Vasicek added that if someone has a question about any of those items on the pay plan or the capital improvement plan or the budget in general, they can contact her office, the city’s finance director or even communications director and get answers.
If one is so inclined, she said, they can also search “budget” on columbusne.us, but they will be reading unabridged financial reports. For the easier-to-read version, the city has published articles summarizing such.
