Coral Springs residents will vote in November on whether to increase the salaries of the city’s mayor and commissioners.
If approved, the ballot question would change the city charter and increase the compensation for Coral Springs’ elected officials, making their salaries comparable to counterparts in neighboring cities.
To calculate the new compensation amounts, the salaries of the mayors and city commissioners of Margate, Tamarac, Pompano Beach, and Coconut Creek would be averaged. Two percent would then be subtracted from those average salaries. The difference would become the salary of Coral Springs’ mayor and commissioners.
The methodology for calculating the officials’ expense allowances in Coral Springs would not change.
Currently, the mayor’s salary in Coral Springs is around $28,000, while commissioners’ salaries are around $22,500.
By comparison, Tamarac’s mayor earns nearly $69,000 annually, and its commissioners’ salaries are about $57,000.In Parkland, city commissioners earn $34,683, and the mayor earns $37,893 plus benefits as of 2022.
“We do get compensated very, very little for the amount of time that we all spend,” Commissioner Nancy Metayer Bowen said at the March 20 commission meeting. “We want to be paid a livable wage, and currently, our compensation does not match that. I think moving forward with this ordinance will eliminate a barrier to coming into local government.”
Whether to change the Coral Springs salaries will appear on municipal ballots for the November 5 election in Coral Springs.
The move to change the salary methodology was recommended by Coral Springs’ Charter Review Committee, according to city records. The city commission voted to approve use of the ballot question at Wednesday’s commission meeting.
Commissioner Joshua Simmons also spoke in support of the salary increases on March 20.
“I’ll be honest with you, they don’t do half the work that we do,” Simmons said of other local elected officials earning more than those in Coral Springs. “And they are receiving compensations to literally barely create any policies for their cities.”
The commission voted last October to raise the salaries of City Manager Frank Babinec and City Attorney John Hearn after determining that both exceeded their job expectations.
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