Your Taxes Are Going Up To Give City Employees Huge Raises – And Your City Manager and City Council Know There Isn’t A Damned Thing You Can Do About It

If you only read city manager Jonathan Smith’s weekly email, you would have no effing clue the city council is going to hear a proposal on Monday to break an explicit promise to Clarkston taxpayers and raise our taxes. I suspect that’s by design. If you don’t know about it, you won’t be able to object to it. That’s how government rolls in Clarkston.

I’m referring this steaming pile of excrement attached to the council packet for the Monday, May 12, 2025, city council meeting titled “2025-2026 Fiscal Year Budget Challenges.” These so-called “budget challenges” are only challenges primarily because of Smith. Yes, I said it. Every single budget he’s proposed in my memory spends every effing available dime rather than saving anything for a rainy day. City council is responsible too – they rubber-stamp all Smith’s requests and don’t care about rainy days either. Smith rarely bothers to look at lesser expensive alternatives for anything – it’s much easier to ask for more and more compensation every year to do less and less work.

Here are the so-called fiscal year budget “challenges.” Once you cut through the B.S., you’ll see that it’s a Trojan horse with the real intent to force you to pay more in taxes just so four city hall employees can get huge compensation increases. So much for Smith’s November 12, 2024 claim: “We’re not gonna raise taxes. I never, ever, would ever propose that we raise taxes. We have to find a way within our walls, within our resources, to make this work.”

Liar.

What services do we receive in exchange for employee salaries? I honestly don’t know. They shovel the streets and mow the Depot Park lawn. They fill cracks in the streets. They run elections. They send us tax and sewer bills. We’re still paying back hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unnecessary Department of Public Works (DPW)/city hall expansion that taxpayers didn’t want (and Smith pushed for) that was funded by robbing the water and sewer funds – and that’s why your sewer bills have increased lately. City employees don’t even bother to double-check the bills they pay, costing taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars that we’ll never recover.

Honest question – why should we give these people tens of thousands of dollars in increased salaries? Why don’t we look at contracting out the essentials and eliminating the rest? It appears the DPW guys do most of the work we value. Maybe we should keep them and contract out the rest. It would definitely be cheaper, and we wouldn’t hear the constant complaints from Smith about the office staff being underpaid for doing things no one knows or cares about.

Let’s break down Smith’s “challenges.”

Smith has two presentation slides in the attached material for “initially anticipated” cost increases and the revisited/modified increases at pages 2 and 3. Is the purpose of the second slide to garner accolades for Smith for doing his job? It’s not clear. What IS clear after looking at the two slides is Smith didn’t do everything he could have done before providing information to the finance committee.

Let’s look at the “challenges”:

• • Police services. Independence Township wants to raise the rate we pay for the police services provided by the Oakland County Sheriff by 15% – oh wait, no, the revised slide states it’s actually 13.4%. Did Smith explore less expensive alternatives with other police departments? Of course he didn’t! That would require work on his part. And let’s not forget that eight of the fourteen years of police (and fire) services overpayments came under Smith’s watch, something he’s refused to take any responsibility for, risibly claiming on multiple occasions that no one could have possibly known about the overpayments without ever explaining how my husband was able to figure it out by going to the same website that Smith used for the last page of his “budget challenges” presentation. To refresh your recollection, Clarkston taxpayers overpaid Independence Township $171,799.59 for police and fire services for fourteen effing years and only were able to recover six years of those overpayments with interest thanks to my husband. As a big middle finger to Clarkston, Independence Township pocketed $84,497.66 of the overpayments – because it was beyond the six-year statute of limitations for contract claims and they knew there was nothing we could legally do about it. In the last proposed contract the public was allowed to examine, we saw that Independence Township had the chutzpah to insert a clause that would prevent us from recovering any future overpayments should our negligent employees overpay again. So yeah, let’s keep blindly contracting with Independence Township for police services without exploring cost savings for working with a municipality that won’t rip us off when our employees do negligent things (and we all know they will continue to do negligent things).

• • Oakland County Assessing Services – This cost is going up by 50.1%. Oh no! But wait, we’re “[c]urrently exploring an agreement with Independence Twp that would largely eliminate this increase.” So, is it a “budget challenge” or not? It’s not. But it IS a way to bury the cost of employee increases by putting as many things as possible on a chart to hide the actual purpose of the chart – which are huge salary increases for four people in city hall. (Smith is a one-trick pony. Someone at Stellantis likely taught him that putting busy slides in a slick presentation is the best way to get management approval, and it’s an artifice he regularly uses to fool taxpayers and the city council.)

• • City attorney – These costs were anticipated to rise by 31.6%. Oh no! Oops. Never mind. The city now anticipates there will be no increase in legal services costs, even though they are factoring in an increase in the city attorney hourly billing rate from $95 to $200 per hour. The truth is that by using block billing and half-hour billing increments, city attorney Tom Ryan’s $95 per hour charge probably worked out on average to an amount that was closer to $200 an hour than $95 an hour. I also think that a 0% increase in the expected annual cost is an acknowledgement by the city that paying a competent attorney up front is a better investment than paying a lesser rate to an attorney who frequently gives bad advice and costs you money.

• • Building and Inspection services – Our current provider essentially fired us because they insisted that we pay a flat fee that far exceeded our actual costs versus an actual use fee. That’s where Smith’s 83.1% initial increase comes from. Apparently, we can get the services through Independence Township for a lesser amount, reflecting a 52.6% increase. (Did we check anywhere else? Probably not. We wouldn’t want to work our city employees too hard by doing research.)

• • Employee salaries. Here is where you’ll find the real reason for the “budget challenges.” By preparing two charts, Smith is telling you that he originally submitted an are-you-effing-kidding-me salary proposal that would have increased the city’s salary budget by 38.7%. But he’s such a hero! His “revisited/modified” salary increase proposal would raise the city’s salary budget by 28%. Sounds good until you do the math and see the proposed salary increases made up 48.7% of the purported shortfall in the “initially anticipated” budget shortfall and is now a higher 50.8% of the purported shortfall in the “revisited/modified” increases.

Huh. When you take out the huge employee raises, it’s obvious there are no actual budget challenges. And, when you factor in the $96,219.57 the city was able to recover for negligent police and fire billing overpayments through my husband’s efforts, there is more than enough to cover $72,641 in fake “budget challenges,” and that includes the insane employee wage increases Smith is demanding.

Even more outrageous was this quote from page 4 of Smith’s presentation – “The proposed elimination of the [library millage] reduction will increase the average annual tax bill in the City by just $99.59.” (My italics.)

Just $99.59. Such a deal! Tell me, fellow Clarkston residents. If this was fairly presented to you, would you vote to pay more in taxes for THIS:

• • Police services (knowing that no one bothered to cost out whether we could get police services at a lesser cost from another local municipality that won’t rip us off) – cost increase: $21,117.
  • Assessing services – cost increase: $0
  • Legal services – cost increase: $0
  • Building and inspections services (which includes nitpicky resident harassment as well as permit inspections) – cost increase: $10,335
  • Office staff – cost increase $36,883 – for four people (but no worries – Smith originally wanted you to pay $51,060 more for four people)

Let’s talk about how we got to the huge salary increase proposal and what the fuss about the library millage is. We’ll tackle the reason for the salary increases first.

Smith loves, loves, loves the contract city clerk. He’s decided that the very fate, nay, the very future of Clarkston’s existence as a city and its elections rests on the shoulder of this one contract city clerk. He doesn’t even care about any of the issues raised by her employment background, and no one has pointed out to him how stupid it is to base an enterprise’s entire future on whether one employee decides to stay or go.

But this particular clerk wants more money in her compensation package than the city could pay, so Smith convinced the city council that taxpayers should be forced to pay up to $4,000 for a B.S. salary survey conducted by Rahmberg Stover to justify more money for salaries. Why was it B.S.? Because it was deliberately limited only to public bodies that participated in the Michigan Municipal League’s salary survey and largely excluded the almost 200 public bodies with populations of less than 1,000 in Michigan. You know, all the people and places like Clarkston.

So, what did we actually get for the money we paid for a “salary survey” from Rahmberg Stover? They queried the preexisting Michigan Municipal League’s database but did no actual research (because that would cost extra). Using that data, they created a salary range with step increases, something that’s not rocket science and likely involved plugging numbers into a preexisting program that spit out proposed salary range and step options for review to avoid manually doing the statistical analysis.

But the point of the $4,000 salary survey was never to properly compare our employees to what other similar-sized public bodies pay for the same work – it was only done so Smith could justify hiring our current contract clerk and meet her compensation demands. But gosh, if we pay her more, then we have to pay everyone else more to make up for it. And before you know it, you have a salary budget that is increased by 28%. (Tell me, what was your salary increase this year? Was it anywhere close to 28%?)

Smith claims it’s OK to ignore data from similar communities because he’s competing with other employers who pay more. Yes, he is. And as I know from personal experience, government wages are always less than private sector wages, sometimes significantly so, and smaller public bodies pay less than larger public bodies because there are fewer taxpayers supporting smaller public bodies. As Smith knows, garbage collectors make a lot more than our city staff, but the question is what job does a person want to do? Collecting garbage is honest work, but if you’d prefer office work in an 800-person city government, you’re going to make less. If Smith can’t find full-time employees to do a job at a rate that’s affordable to the taxpayers, then the answer is to contract out those things that are important and eliminate those things that aren’t – not raise taxes on residents who receive almost non-existent city services.

Or at least that’s what a competent city manager would do. Unfortunately, we have a retired project manager from Stellantis who has never had an effing clue about what a municipal city manager does. Taxpayers have paid a heavy price for that in the form of hundreds of thousands of dollars and we’ve chased stupid ideas because of that incompetence – from cost overruns on an unnecessary expansion of city hall, to negligent police and fire services overpayments, to upending our entire salary structure because Smith has glommed onto one person and sees her as the equivalent of the second coming of our Lord to save the city’s election services. And those are just three examples.

But why this particular clerk? Because our city manager likes her. That’s the only reason. It doesn’t matter to Smith or the city council that in the recent past, this contract clerk abruptly left two jobs, one of which is shrouded in secrecy and occurred after only 15 months of very well-paid employment; she made two formal complaints against co-employees alleging harassment at two different employers that her previous employers found unmeritorious and that resulted in an entry in her own personnel file; her discipline record; and her job hopping. Frankly, if Smith continues to insist that taxpayers must hire her rather than contract out the election work, then he should submit an undated resignation letter to be used if she doesn’t work out because taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to continue to pay for Smith’s abject failures. (Though I haven’t yet published the details here, if you’re interested in more information about the clerk’s background, you can send a FOIA request to the city asking for a copy of my March 31, 2025, email titled “Budget considerations for the clerk position” that summarized what I found through sending FOIA requests to the contract clerk’s previous public employers that includes links to the actual documents I received. Draw your own conclusions.)

So, how are we supposed to pay for Smith’s huge, proposed salary increases?

By breaking an express promise that the city council made to Clarkston taxpayers and force us to pay .691 mills in increased taxes without a vote. You need to know some city history to really understand what a piece of 💩 move this is by Smith, every member of the finance committee, and the other members of the city council who will inevitably vote for this. (And so you know where to place the initial blame, the finance committee members are Smith, mayor Sue Wylie, and councilmembers Al Avery and Ted Quisenberry.)

Let’s travel back in time to 2012, when what we now know as the Clarkston Independence District Library existed as a department of Independence Township. The library was funded by a dedicated millage of .691 mills from Independence Township taxpayers with Clarkston matching the equivalent of .691 mills paid from our general fund for library services so that Clarkston residents could use the township’s library.

In 2012, library officials wanted to form a district library as allowed under state law that would be supported with a larger proposed millage rate of 1.25 mills. This change would allow the Library to have its own funding, its own board, and run its own affairs. If the proposal passed, the lower .691 millage that Independence Township taxpayers had been paying would disappear. But there was one problem in our part of the world – since Clarkston taxpayers were paying for library services out of the general fund rather than through a separate millage, there was nothing stopping our city government from taking that .691 mills and applying it to some other pet city council or city manager project while we were also paying an additional 1.25 mills for the new district library.

To entice Clarkston voters to vote yes on the district library proposal, the city council unequivocally promised taxpayers if they voted yes on the district library proposal, they would not be double taxed – specifically, the .691 mills that had been paid to the township for the library through our general fund would not be collected from Clarkston taxpayers every year because we would be paying 1.25 mills under the new proposal. Relying on that explicit promise, Clarkston taxpayers voted for the district library we now have.

The city council’s promise to taxpayers was memorialized in a resolution. My husband, who was on the city council at the time, drafted that resolution and a copy is attached here. Because resolutions can be changed by future city councils, it was an act of raw trust on the part of the taxpayers to rely on the city’s promise that the .691 mill reduction would continue in future years. (We were apparently really dumb to trust our city government, weren’t we?)

Over the years, some city officials have tried to claim the library millage promise was intended for only the first tax year. That doesn’t pass the straight face test. Not only would Clarkston taxpayers not have agreed to be screwed by the equivalent of .691 additional mills for library services for all the following years if they voted yes on the district library proposal, the city council resolution that we all relied on very clearly states what the city’s promise was: “In future years, the City will reduce its general operating levy by 0.691 mills from the level that the City would otherwise have imposed.” Note that it does not add “until such time that Smith and the finance committee want to give giant salary increases to city employees.” No matter what happens this budget year, Clarkston taxpayers should learn a lesson from this – never, ever trust anything Clarkston government officials tell you because they’re not trustworthy.

For newer residents (and current residents who may have forgotten), this .691 mill rollback promise has been kept ever since it was implemented and has been written about several times in the Clarkston News: June 15, 2016 – “Tax Rebate”; November 22, 2016 – “‘No’ to Busting Tax Break”; November 30, 2017 – “Audit Clean, Library Millage Talk Returns”; March 9, 2018 – “Library Funding Honors Agreement With Voters,” Guest Viewpoint by former city council member Scott Reynolds.

Here are some interesting quotes from those Clarkston News articles.

From “Tax Rebate”:

• • “It’s not our money,” agreed Mayor Pro Tem Eric Haven at the June 13 meeting. “We made a commitment. We need to keep our commitment.”
  • (From Sue Wylie’s husband Steve): “I’m giving you a chance to honor the commitment to taxpayers you made in 2014,” Wylie said. “The language is crystal clear.”
  • [Current mayor] Susan Wylie, Steve’s wife, said the resolution calls for adjustment every year. “It says the city will reduce its general operating millage levy by 0.691 mills from the level that the city would otherwise have imposed,” she said.
  • “The last three years, the starting point was the 2014 Headlee number,” Wylie said. “It should be the 2016 number.”
  • The 0.691-mill is what the city used to pay to the township for the library, [Steve] Wylie said. “We used to pay Independence Township for use of the library,” he said. “We don’t have to do that anymore. That’s why the resolution was passed. It’s only fair for us to give it back to the citizens. That’s what you voted on. If you pass this millage, you’re not doing it.”
  • Haven said he agreed council promised to reduce the millage by 0.691.

From “No to Busting Tax Break”:

• • Haven proposed eliminating a 0.691 millage reduction made in 2014. At the time, it was an incentive to vote for a new millage for the Clarkston Independence District Library. The council voted 5-1 against his proposal.
  • Approving it would have meant double taxing residents, said Steve Wylie, former council member speaking during public comment. “You sort of made a contract with the citizens in 2014 – please vote for the library millage and we pledge we won’t double tax you. I’d hate to see this group go back on that,” Wylie said.
  • “I want this voted down tonight,” [current councilmember Al] Avery said. “Then, if we want to bring the auditor in to look at how we’re taxing, I would vote for that – I don’t want to leave it out there. To me, this is inaccurate.”
  • The proposed resolution was to eliminate the 0.691 mill reduction for for library services, because “it was not the council’s intention to subsidize by a reduction permanently of 0.691 mills for library services yearly that are otherwise separately authorized for the district library.” [Former councilmember Mike] Sabol, Avery, Haven, and [former] council members Sharron Catallo and Jason Kneisc voted “no” on the resolution. Mayor Joe Luginski and Council member David Marsh were absent.
  • In 2014, the council approved the tax break as an incentive to voters. To eliminate that would result in double taxation, Sabol said.
    “People voted to put the millage of .691 on themselves for the library,” he said. “If we put the .691 mills back in, they would not only pay for the library through the new millage, but also pay something they paid before and was taken out.”
  • Avery said the 2014 resolution was clear. “Are we trying to say there was a mistake? I find that hard to believe,” he said. “The decision was made to reduce the rate by the amount previously charged for the library.”
  • “It’s very clear – subtract .691 from what you would otherwise impose,” Wylie said. “So far, the city has acted properly. If you adopt this language, it would no longer be acting properly.”
  • “You never had that money to use,” said resident Robyn Johnston. “If you have to use it, you have to be up front and say you want to increase taxes.”
  • Resident Karen Eckert said there are two issues, the promise of council to eliminate the library millage to encourage citizens to vote for the library and the need for more tax revenue. “Be up front, say we need a tax increase because we don’t have the revenue to provide services to citizens,” Eckert said. “Don’t go back and say we only meant we would reduce it half a year. You know it was not the intent.”

From “Audit Clean, Library Millage Talk Returns”:

• • Resident Lorry Mahler said the provision was created as an incentive for voters to approve the district library millage, and upheld last year. It was written to avoid double taxation. “The city’s not giving us anything,” Mahler said. “It’s so we’re not paying it twice, that’s all.”
  • “My opinion is we made a promise to the citizens,” said [former] Mayor Steven Percival. “Thirty thousand would be nice but we promised it back to the citizens so it would pass.”

You’ll note some of those quotes are from finance committee members Mayor Sue Wylie and councilmember Al Avery. This tells you these two know exactly what they are doing in allowing this proposal to come out of the finance committee. They apparently have no problem breaking an express promise to Clarkston taxpayers and raising taxes by .691 mills without a vote. Why? Because they effing can and obviously don’t care about you.

On Smith’s summary page (page 4), Smith notes that taxing us more won’t affect the library. Of course it won’t. It never did. The .691 mill reduction was a forever promise from the city to benefit Clarkston taxpayers, not the library. The library district was formed in 2014, will continue to exist whether or not Smith and the council break the city’s forever promise, and we will continue to be taxed separately to support the library.

The .691 mills does NOT belong to city government. Stealing it to pay employee salaries – and stealing is the proper term – is no different than someone managing their parents’ finances deciding they’re entitled to take some “extra” for themselves without asking their parents’ permission because they need money to pay their car payment this month. Just like the car payment in my hypothetical, Smith and the other finance committee members are proposing to take money that doesn’t belong to them simply because it’s there, they think they are entitled to it, they don’t have to ask for our permission, and there’s nothing we can do to stop them. We should have heeded former resident Cory Johnston’s suggestion to make the change permanent through a charter modification when the .691 mill rollback was suggested rather than trust Clarkston government – because they’re clearly not trustworthy.

Mr. Johnston was right; we were wrong. Taxpayer promises made in resolutions based on trust are apparently not worth the powder to blow them to Hades. Remember that.

It’s nothing new for your city government to take taxpayer money that was expressly earmarked for one thing and use it for something else. Your city government also raided OUR water and sewer funds to pay for a Department of Public Works/City Hall expansion over the vociferous objections of taxpayers that were expressed through a petition and city-wide sign campaign. Wondering why you keep seeing increases to your sewer bills? It’s because your city council chose to “borrow” the money for this project from those funds and it’s not there now that we need it for repairs. Why? Because they could – and just as it is with the library millage, they know there isn’t an effing thing we can do about it. Not even a lawsuit would stop this.

The honorable thing to do is to ask taxpayers for a tax increase to pay for these giant salary increases. After all, if it’s such a good idea, why wouldn’t they do that? We all know the answer – because it’s not a good idea, they’re pretty sure Clarkston voters would say no, and they’re not honorable people. Breaching the public trust by taking away the library mileage credit against the taxpayers’ collective will means there is nothing we can do – except see the city officials for the liars they are and never, ever, ever trust anything a city official tells you again. (Does this fire you up enough to run for city council? I hope so. We definitely need more honorable people.)

The primary reason for breaching the public’s trust is so not worth it. If the contract clerk’s past employment history is any indication, she’ll be here only as long as it takes her to find a better opportunity somewhere else. Taxpayers will be screwed again, getting minimal services at an even greater cost. And when that happens, we just won’t be able to have elections in Clarkston anymore, since Smith apparently believes she’s the only thing that can keep our local democracy alive. As my grandpa used to say in response to outrageous claims, “horse feathers.” The only thing that will happen when she eventually leaves is we will contract for election services with another local government, something we should be doing now.

Most of the overspending, cost overruns, and mismanagement can be laid at Smith’s feet, including this. Frankly, the day he finally leaves the city will be a cause for taxpayer celebration.