Wake GOP calls out Allen’s $10k raise, other Raleigh budget blunders
When the Raleigh City Council adopted its ‘09-10 budget Tuesday, Wake County’s new Republican chair saw his opening. Today, speaking to the Wake Republican Women’s Club, he ran through it. Claude Pope Jr. chided the Council, with its 7-1 Democratic majority, for failing to cut City Manager Russell Allen’s proposed spending plan — to the contrary, Pope noted with distaste, they added almost $2 million to it. The adopted budget leaves the city’s property tax rate unchanged. In these parlous times, however, the Council should’ve cut it, Pope argued.
The budget offers pay raises of up to 4 percent to city employees, based on their merit. (No across-the-board pay hike for inflation.) Pope said police and firefighters “deserve all we can give them,” but other city employees should’ve been asked to go without. The Council wouldn’t even trim arts funding by the mere 11 percent that lone Republican Philip Isley proposed, Pope complained. Isley was the lone “no” vote on the budget, a fact cheered by the GOP faithful.
But the real applause line was about Allen’s own pay raise, from $210,000 a year to $220,000. “I take it as a matter a principle,” Pope said, “that in times like these,” Pope said, “no government executive should be giving themselves a big pay raise.”
Allen, he went on, should turn the money down. Continue reading »
