Salt Lake County Council approves uneven pay for aides

After four years of stasis, a mini-crisis in the Salt Lake County Council has council members rethinking how their office is structured.

When the new council-mayor form of government was created in 2000, the council voted to each have an administrative assistant who would answer to that individual council member rather than have a central staff. But now they're reconsidering that arrangement.

"We're seeing the evolution of our staff," Councilman Cortlund Ashton said.

The renewed discussion comes as a result of one councilman wanting to pay his administrative assistant more and another councilman wanting to pay his less.

Ashton's administrative assistant, Michael Chabries, got his doctoral degree in homeland security late last year. And Ashton was casting about for ways to keep him around instead of having him go elsewhere and making a lot more money than the approximately $55,000 a year he's getting right now.

So Ashton made a deal with incoming Councilman Mark Crockett: You give Chabries some of the money you would pay your administrative aide, and he'll do work for you, too. Crockett went along with the deal, since his incoming administrative aide, Julie Peck, didn't want to work full-time.

After much carping, the other council members approved the arrangement Tuesday. But several of them complained that instead of modifying the council office structure piecemeal, they should look at overhauling the whole thing.

"Rather than put a kinky fix on this, let's go back to the planning board," Councilman Jim Bradley said. "You're proposing a minority and majority staff."

The council adopted legislative intent Tuesday, indicating it intends to look at the possibility of creating a councilwide staff, which would answer to a chief of staff, instead of having individual aides. The Salt Lake City Council and many others have an overall council staff.

The individual-aide staff has occasioned problems over the years — with some council members working their staffers to death and others letting theirs skate — in addition to turf battles between staffers of different political persuasions and, occasionally, the same persuasion.

While many council members said they weren't completely content with the Chabries/Peck arrangement, they approved it because, in the words of Councilman Joe Hatch, "This is not an end but an incremental approach."

As for Chabries himself, he said his increased salary and commensurately increased hours will result in better governmental performance.

"What I'm hoping is at the end of the day the taxpayers will get better analysis, better resources," he said.

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