Feast your eyes on this slide from the budget proposal city manager Jonathan Smith is presenting on May 27:
On May 12, city manager Jonathan Smith estimated the salary increases for city hall employees would cost $37,000. What he neglected to say was that after factoring in Department of Public Works (DPW) employee increases, the total for employee salary increases has now jumped 21.4% to $44,920!
These salary increases will be funded with a .691 mill tax increase that you don’t get to vote on. The .691 mills represents the library millage rollback, something the city council promised us in 2014 would always be there to entice us to vote yes for the district library back then. Now that the city got what it wanted, Smith and the city council members don’t believe they should keep the promise any longer.
.691 mills is equivalent to $43,864 in overall tax dollars to the city this year. (I discussed the .691 mill tax increase and why it’s so incredibly unethical for the city council to do this here and here.) Unfortunately, that library millage promise harks back to a time before our greedy city manager was hired, and he’s lying to people about what happened back then. But even $43,900 in additional property taxes is not enough to satisfy Smith’s overall salary demands for all six city employees because he’s still short by $1,020.
You read that right – raising our taxes to the maximum that is legally allowable right now without our consent – and breaking a lifetime promise to taxpayers to do it – isn’t enough for Smith.
Smith repeatedly touts the flawed “3rd-party, independent salary survey” as the sole basis for all these salary increases and pretends he’s just following a recommendation. (Gosh, it’s not his fault, it’s the salary survey guy’s fault!) What Smith doesn’t tell you is that salary survey excluded the vast majority of the 200 or so cities in Michigan that are most like Clarkston, with populations under 1,000. How convenient! In order to make up for this glaring deficiency, Smith is using the low end of the salary range for communities with HUGE populations that are nothing like ours and calling it good – rather than surveying communities of our size and getting a better idea how much SMALL communities pay for the positions we have in Clarkston. (But if he did that, he’d have no support for his big salary demands, would he?)
And let’s not forget that Smith’s claimed reason for inducing the city council to give him thousands of dollars to pay for the biased salary survey in the first place was to provide support for the compensation demands of the current contract clerk before she would deign to work for us as the actual city clerk. Yet at the end of the day, Smith is proposing the clerk get less of an overall dollar increase than he’s grabbing for himself.
Are you surprised? I’m not. Does anyone seriously doubt that wasn’t Smith’s game plan all along? You shouldn’t have.
The two guys in the Department of Public Works (DPW) who do the work we actually care about are not part of the big money grab – the laborer is being moved to full-time and shows a larger increase on the chart because of that, but he’s really only getting a $.54/hour raise. Remember the DPW supervisor that Smith claimed we had to worry about keeping last year? That was then, this is now, and Smith is apparently not so worried about the DPW supervisor leaving anymore, recommending he get only a 5.7% raise.
To restate, here are Smith’s salary demands from the chart I posted above:
A 29.4% salary increase for himself – $13,235/year
A 20% salary increase for the treasurer – $6,680/year
A 30.8% salary increase for the clerk – $11,780/year
A 12% increase for the administrative assistant – $1,485/year
Now let’s take another look at the office staff salary chart and put it in terms that we can all relate to. You see, Smith likes to display annual salary totals for a reduced hour work week to fool you into thinking the proposed increases aren’t as bad as they really are. Unlike the poor schlubs who work 40+ hours a week (everyone else), our city employees work a leisurely 32 hours per week (except for the administrative assistant who apparently will work approximately 12.5 hours a week, inferred by taking the $13,880 annual cost for her services divided by $21.42/hour = 648 hours, divided by 52 = 12.46 hours).
Smith likes to focus on the overall yearly salary payments for budget purposes, but in order to determine whether these salaries are competitive with other cities or other employment, you have to look at the other number that he’s given you – the hourly rate. As an example, Smith would justify paying someone $100/hour for working five hours a week and tell you that you shouldn’t be concerned because it’s only costing the taxpayers $26,000 a year for this person. But the point in that example isn’t that it’s costing us $26,000/year – it’s that he’s paying someone $100 an hour. The question to ask is whether $100/hour is the fair market rate for doing the work for a city our size, not whether $26,000 is an acceptable amount to pay for a year of that work.
Let’s look at another example. Suppose the market rate for an experienced secretary in our area is $40,000 a year. The hourly rate for that is $19.23. I arrived at that number by dividing $40,000 by the 2080 working hours in a normal year for a 40-hour work week. If Smith hired a secretary and paid him or her $19.23/hour, it wouldn’t matter if he or she were working 32 hours a week or 40 hours a week – $19.23 is the market rate, and Smith’s chart should reflect a $19.23 rate and an annual salary of $31,998.72 (there are 1664 hours in a year when someone works a 32-hour work week, and $19.23 x 1664 is $31,998,72).
Most of us think in terms of annual salaries for 40-hour work weeks because that’s what most of the work world works, including people in government offices. When you’re comparing annual salaries for our positions in other cities, you have to equalize them, so either Clarkston’s rates have to be bumped up by 25% before the comparison, or the salaries of the cities you’re comparing Clarkston to have to be reduced by 20%. Since the rest of the world is using a 40-hour work week, I’m going to equalize Clarkston’s rates to a 40-hour work week and multiply them by 2080 hours, the number of hours in a year at 40 hours per week.
Here are the hourly rates computed from Smith’s chart and the annual rate:
City manager Jonathan Smith – $34.99/hour ($72,779.20/year is the 40-hour rate)
Treasurer Greg Coté – $24.04/hour ($50,003.20/year is the 40-hour rate)
Clerk Angela Guillen – $30.05/hour ($62,504/year is the 40-hour rate)
Administrative assistant Evelyn Bihl – $21.42/hour ($44,553.60/year is the 40-hour rate)
Now things become clearer, don’t they?
How many of you make the equivalent of $72,779.20/year ($34.99 per hour)? Do you think people who make that much money should be held accountable when the city they manage overpays for police and fire services for eight years without asking for backup for the payment request, without reading the contract, and without even having a complete and current contract in the file? Would you accept an excuse that there was no possible way he could have known about the overpayments when someone outside the city (my husband) was able to figure it out? Yet, the same person who was responsible for the largest portion of an almost $200,000 loss to taxpayers (Smith) is demanding a 29.4% raise to an annual 40-hour equivalent of $72,779.20. If we need to pay our city manager $34.99/hour, then we can hire a professional (someone with experience or at least education in municipal administration) to manage the city (which would definitely not be Smith).
Guillen’s annual rate of $62,504 is even more interesting and is a great example why you need to annualize salary rates to compare them across cities. The rate she’s demanding is pretty darn close to the rate she was making when she worked for the City of Howell a few years ago. Howell hired her for $59,000/year ($28.365/hour) in February 2021, raised her rate to $65,435/year ($31.46/hour) in September 2021, raised her rate to $67,070 ($32.245/hour) in January 2022, and raised her again to $69,409 ($33.37/hour) in February 2022 which is what she was making at the time she abruptly left Howell under as-of-yet unexplained circumstances. Guillen’s salary demand to Clarkston is $30.05/hour to do clerk work for our city of 880 people living in one-half square mile. Howell is a city of almost five square miles with a population of almost 10,000 people. FYI, the Howell city clerk’s office is located in their city hall that is open to the public from 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday through Thursday (40 hours per week). Still believe the salary ranges Smith is using from his salary survey are appropriate? It looks quite different when you compare apples to apples, even when the salaries are a few years old for the 10,000-person City of Howell.
Smith’s chart also doesn’t show the salaries people are actually being paid. Take Evelyn Bihl, for example. She’s the “administrative assistant” on Smith’s latest salary increase chart. But is that what she is? In budget presentations over the years, Smith has referred to her an administrative assistant and a treasurer assistant (and sometimes both titles at the same time). She was elevated to a deputy clerk last September when Smith asked council to raise her rate to $21.00/hour from $19.13/hour. Now, she’s apparently back to an administrative assistant at a rate of $19.30/hour – without council approval – and Smith claims we need to raise her rate to $21.42. Wait, what? That’s more for an “administrative” job than she was paid when she was a deputy clerk!
Now let’s look at treasurer Greg Coté. His rate was raised to $21.00/hour last September from $20.02/hour when Bihl’s rate was raised – even though nothing had changed with his job. So why did we have to pay him more? Smith’s answer was “to maintain a correlation between office salaries.” Essentially, Smith wanted to throw money at Coté using Bihl’s salary increase as an excuse when they aren’t doing the same job. Smith’s current chart shows Coté has been paid more than the $21.00/hour rate – without council approval. In fact, Coté has been making $21.36/hour and Smith is demanding taxpayers raise his rate to $24.04/hour.
Want to bet no one on city council will even ask any questions about the games Smith is playing with Bihl’s and Coté’s salary rates? If you want to really know what any of these people actually make, you will have to FOIA a copy of their paychecks because the numbers in Smith’s budget proposals are not truthful. He wants to raise our taxes by .691 mills without our consent and he’ll spend it as he sees fit damnit. He doesn’t even think he owes the city council an accurate portrayal of city hall salaries.
Smith wants you to believe all these salaries are properly supported by a “3rd-party, independent salary survey.” Riiiiight. That would be the same salary survey that he used to justify Guillen’s $30.05/hour salary demand that was more on par with the rate a 10,000-person city paid for the job three years ago. But hey, Smith is going to throw us a bone and open the office up on Fridays again. Note that Smith is apparently NOT increasing employee hours, so the only way to do this is to stagger the hours the employees work. Never fear – based on his salary proposal, they’ll all still work a leisurely 32 hour work week and get all their vacation time, sick time, and their 14 paid holidays. Smith apparently thinks you’re stupid and is trying to fool you into thinking that you’re getting something extra in exchange for the outrageous salary increases. Clearly, you’re not.
Are you p*ssed off enough yet?
Based on Smith’s chart, it will cost Clarkston taxpayers over a quarter of a million dollars – $258,950 – just to pay for employee salaries. That’s $294 for every man, woman, and child in Clarkston and $5,750 more than he’s proposing to spend in the capital project fund for work like replacing dead or damaged trees, maintaining sign posts, safety crosswalk paint/tape, general infrastructure repairs, road repair and resurfacing (with $100,000 coming from state funds), “your speed” signs, repairing/replacing office furniture, security systems and cameras, storm drain repairs or lining (which he’s been passing off to us with extra charges on our sewer bills and will no doubt do again), and scanning and storing city documents. And that’s using an 880-person population. Census Reporter reports our population at 842 using the 2023 American Community Survey 5-year, which means every man, woman, and child in Clarkston is each paying $307.54 to support these salaries.
Oh, and then there’s the cost of health insurance that Smith wants all our part-time employees to have that he referred to on May 12. And Smith also plans to add a bigger taxpayer match to the employees’ retirement savings plan, something he also referred to on May 12. Where are those additional costs in the presentation? Nowhere. He’s hiding it because it makes the actual cost of these increases much higher than $44,920, the overall cost for these employees even greater than a quarter of a million dollars, and it increases the per person cost to support city employees even higher.
Employee salaries alone will constitute about 28% of our anticipated general fund expenditures for the next fiscal year. Excluding the DPW guys, what do the people in city hall do for us? Honestly, not much, but they sure do whine about being underpaid for doing whatever it is they are doing that is so very important 🙄 – that I doubt we would miss if they stopped.
How about they do less of whatever that is and save us some money? Or better yet, let’s contract out the work these people are supposedly doing to Independence Township or someone else. It would certainly be cheaper.
OUR CITY COUNCIL MEMBERS NEED TO GROW A SPINE AND REJECT SMITH’S OUTRAGEOUS COMPENSATION DEMANDS.
Unfortunately, the only way there is any chance they’ll do that is if you and every voter in your family takes the time to let them know by calling city hall; calling Smith; showing up at the public hearing at 7:00 on May 27, 2025, at city hall; showing up at the final budget hearing on at 7:00 on June 9, 2025, at city hall; and emailing your city council members. (FYI, you can attend city council meetings virtually from the convenience of your living room if you can’t make it to city call and you are allowed to make public comments virtually – just follow the instructions on the meeting notice on the city council agenda.)
The budget isn’t final until the final budget vote on June 9, 2025. There will be a public hearing at the May 27, 2025, city council meeting before the final vote takes place. If you’re not happy with a .691 mill tax increase that will be used primarily to give salary and benefit increases to four city hall employees, then you need to let the city know by showing up at the May 27 meeting and the June 9 meeting.
If you can’t come to the meetings, you can call the city at (248) 625-1559. Whoever answers the phone is one of the people who will receive a giant salary increase. Let them know what you think of that. Politely, of course.
You can also call city manager Jonathan Smith. His city cell phone number is (248) 909-3380 and he keeps his city cell phone with him at all times. Call whenever you want, and he’ll probably answer. Give him an earful but be polite. You can also email him at Smithj@villageofclarkston.org.
And you should definitely also email all your city council members because Smith can’t be trusted to forward comments that don’t support his higher tax plan.
You can email your city council members at the following addresses:
Sue Wylie, WylieS@VillageofClarkston.org
Laura Rodgers, RodgersL@VillageofClarkston.org
Gary Casey, CaseyG@VillageofClarkston.org
Amanda Forte, ForteA@VillageofClarkston.org
Erica Jones, jonese@VillageofClarkston.org
Ted Quisenberry, QuisenberryT@VillageofClarkston.org
Al Avery, averya@VillageofClarkston.org
Better yet, do all these things.
The city is out of runway with regard to partying with our tax dollars. After breaching the library millage promise, there is nowhere else for the city to go except to ask you for even more tax dollars to support employee salaries and Smith’s special projects In the future. Your priorities as a taxpayer will be left in the dust.
As I said in the beginning, these salary increases are obscene – and the city needs to hear that from each one of us.