The Aurora City Council will vote Tuesday on hiring a management company to study the pay for aldermen and the mayor.
Aldermen will vote on spending $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.
Ald. Carl Franco, 5th Ward, the council’s Finance Committee chair, said in the last two cycles of pay setting, the council used numbers comparable to other area cities “to come up with what we thought was fair.”
“We thought this was a good time to use the ‘Hay Study’ that we use for staff to figure out what they see where we should be,” he said.
The Hay Study was done by Korn Ferry for the city in making compensation and benefit recommendations for city employees.
Members of the Finance Committee had asked city staff to get a quote from Korn Ferry to do a study for the aldermanic and mayoral pay. That was presented to the full council at the Committee of the Whole meeting on Tuesday.
The proposed study would include evaluation of the 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 would look at the market pricing of each job against the Korn Ferry database for public sector jobs.
The company would write up a formal analysis within two to three weeks. The study would 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 $248,701 a year, with a 5% increase due this year.
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.
slord@tribpub.com