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Date: 7/5/2023
AMHERST — Town councilors will see their yearly stipends increase come January following a 7-4 vote at its June 26 meeting.
Councilor pay will rise from $5,000 to $10,000 on January 2, 2024, when the new council begins. Also at that time, compensation for the council president goes from $7,500 to $12,000.
An earlier recommendation by the Finance Committee had put the increases at $7,500 for councilors and $9,000 for the council president.
Where the additional money for the increases will come from was discussed at the meeting but has not yet been defined.
Councilor Dorothy Pam spoke in favor of the increase.
“Town councilors are democratically elected in order to represent the whole body of the town and if we are to stop being a group of the quote-unquote-elite who know better and want to make decisions for other people, we have to make possible for a broader cross-section of people to afford to do this job which everyone knows is a very time-consuming job,” she said. “The council is deeply enriched by the presence of one mother of school-aged kids on the council, there’s a reason there aren’t others, and it has a lot to do with compensation.”
Councilor Cathy Schoen expressed discomfort with the increase to $10,000 in favor of the $7,500 hike given the denial of funding or lesser amounts for some projects in the budget.
“I think the extremely tight budget and the very tough negotiations plus when the schools asked for $85,000 more and we said no, I could not bring myself to go into the higher amount,” she said.
Councilor Ellisha Walker said the original motion had been in fact for the increase to $10,000 annually and was brought forth with the intention of increasing diversity on the next council.
“This is and will continue to be one of the biggest barriers for people of different socio-economic statuses for different life makeups, for different household compositions, for different races and ethnicities and people of different experiences,” she said. “I think it’s very, very important to continue looking at it in that light as an initiative to increase diversity and participation and not just as increase to our salaries.”
Also speaking in favor of the full increase, Councilor Ana Devlin-Gauthier who spoke not only to the genuine costs of childcare but also of the time spent on council and committee responsibilities.
“The reality is a 40-hour a week job plus hours on council doesn’t leave a lot left for other things like sleep, relationships with friends and family, taking care of ourselves, maybe having a hobby that’s not counsel, I don’t know,” she said.
The original motion was amended to allow flexibility for where the town manager would find the funding for the increases and to raise the actual stipend increases to $10,000 for councilors and $12,000 for the council president.
With the changes, the motion passed 7-4.
The increase will not apply to the current council, but the incoming body come January 2024.