The Aurora City Council Tuesday night approved hiring a consultant to look at how much the mayor and aldermen should be paid.
Aldermen voted 10-1 to spend $23,940 to hire Korn Ferry, a global management company with an office in Chicago, to study where the council might set aldermanic and mayoral salaries for the next four to five years.
Korn Ferry uses what is known as the “Hay Study” to study compensation for city employees. It will now use the study to look at pay for aldermen and mayor.
The study will include evaluation of aldermanic and mayoral compensation; create a custom peer group of up to 15 Midwest cities of comparable size and complexity and governance style to Aurora; gather publicly available data for the role of mayor and alderman for each city in the peer group; and analyze and present the publicly available data gathered.
The study will look at the market pricing of each job against the Korn Ferry database for public sector jobs.
The company will write up a formal analysis within two to three weeks. The study will come through the council’s Finance Committee, then go to the full council.
The council has a window before the next city election, in 2025, in which to change compensation.
No elected board can increase salaries for itself. Any increase voted on this year for aldermen would take effect in 2027. For the mayor, any increase would be in 2025.
Aldermen currently are paid $22,299 a year, and get $90 for each meeting. They will get yearly pay hikes through 2026, at which point the yearly salary would be $25,588.
The mayor is paid $169,020 a year, not the higher amount that has been previously reported.
In the past, Aurora did a pay study through the Chamber of Commerce, with several special committees joining in. Four years ago, the city did a study in-house looking at comparable pay in other cities.
Aldermen have said they still will look at comparable cities in conjunction with the Korn Ferry work.
slord@tribpub.com
