Supervisors Advance $400 Monthly Raise for Board Chair

SIERRA COUNTY — The Sierra County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday introduced an ordinance that would raise the pay of its own chairperson by $400 a month, eliminating a $100 monthly stipend and replacing it with a $500 addition to the chair’s salary. No supervisor spoke against the change across the three meetings in which it was discussed.

Every Sierra County supervisor is currently paid $3,498.73 a month under the county code. The chairperson receives that salary plus the $100 stipend. Under the proposed ordinance, the stipend disappears, and the chair’s salary instead includes an additional $500 a month, bringing the chair’s monthly pay to $3,998.73. The office rotates among the supervisors, and Supervisor Paul Roen of District 3 holds it this year.

The proposal came from Supervisor Lila Heuer of District 2, who raised it as a discussion item on July 7 and will leave the board when her term ends in January. Heuer said she had watched the chair’s workload up close during four years in office and concluded about a year ago that the stipend was too low. She said she was willing to raise the subject because she is not running again and would not benefit from the change, and that she believed the $100 figure had gone untouched for more than twenty years.

Heuer’s argument rested on the structure of Sierra County government. The county employs no county administrative officer or county manager, the position that in most California counties runs day-to-day operations, and the board chair fills that role instead. Heuer said the chair presides over board meetings, runs the regular department head meetings, signs the county’s contracts, works with county counsel and the clerk of the board, and fields calls from department heads throughout the week. “We can’t afford to pay somebody to do that job,” she said. “But yet we’re asking somebody to take that job for a year.”

Supervisor Sharon Dryden of District 5, the board’s vice chair, said she had served as chair twice in eight years and had misjudged the job before taking it. “I did not realize how much work goes into being chair,” she said. Dryden said supervisors she has met from other counties through the California State Association of Counties have staff and chief administrative officers, while in Sierra County the chair acts as chief executive.

Travel came up at every meeting. Supervisors receive no reimbursement for mileage or fuel on in-county travel, and the chair drives to Downieville for department head meetings, typically on Mondays, on top of the regular board schedule. Roen said the board eliminated in-county mileage reimbursement roughly a decade ago in response to abuses under a previous board. Supervisor Lee Adams of District 1 said the board’s current salary levels were set in part to account for the loss of that reimbursement and the elimination of longevity pay for elected board members.

Adams was the most cautious of the supervisors on the amount. “This is always an uncomfortable decision because we’re talking about our own pay,” he said on July 7, adding that he did not disagree with anything his colleagues had said but did not know what the right figure was. He told the board that Nevada County pays its chair about $356 a month more than its other supervisors, and noted that Nevada County also employs a chief administrative officer at a cost he estimated at roughly a quarter of a million dollars a year. He asked county counsel and the personnel director to survey comparable counties before the board settled on a number. On July 21, he said the exercise is uncomfortable but unavoidable: “somebody has to set these, and unfortunately we get to set our own, good or bad.”

Supervisor Terry LeBlanc of District 4 said he supported a raise for the chair while ruling himself out for the job. “I’m just an old truck driver,” he said, telling the board he had said from the start that the chairmanship was beyond his range. He said he had no opinion on the amount.

One member of the public spoke on July 7. Michael Miller told the board he had driven over expecting to object. “I came over thinking that it was inappropriate,” he said, but after hearing the explanation of the chair’s duties, he said he fully supported the increase and hoped residents who do not follow county business closely would come to understand it.

At the July 21 meeting, County Counsel Andrew Plett steered the board away from raising the stipend and toward raising the salary, which is why the ordinance does both at once. State law expressly provides for supervisor salaries and for reimbursement of direct expenses but does not expressly authorize stipends, he said, leaving them in what he called a legal gray area. Stipends are meant to cover costs incurred in carrying out duties, Plett said, while salary compensates for performing them, and a $500 stipend would be a significant outlier against the $100 to $200 range he found elsewhere. He said his review of the county’s ordinance history indicated Sierra County once paid its chair an additional salary amount before switching to a stipend. Treating the increase as salary would also make it taxable, simpler for payroll to track, and countable as compensation for retirement purposes for a supervisor who participates in the public employees’ retirement system.

Dryden said she preferred a flat amount to the alternative Plett raised of restoring fuel reimbursement, which he said would require close administrative oversight and had been dropped partly for that reason. “I would rather see a flat fee than get back into the fuel reimbursement,” she said, noting the receipts and mileage tracking it would add for the auditor’s office. Both she and Heuer said the compensation of the full board may warrant a separate look later.

Plett presented the finished ordinance on August 4, and confirmed that the change is not retroactive. Dryden moved to introduce the ordinance and waive the first reading, and Heuer seconded. It passed 4-0, with LeBlanc absent due to illness.

Introduction is the first of two required steps. The ordinance is scheduled for a second reading and adoption at the board’s August 18 meeting and cannot take effect unless it passes that second vote. Under the California Government Code, the portion of any ordinance that changes supervisorial salaries takes effect 60 days after adoption rather than the 30 days that applies to most county ordinances.