Honolulu voters will get a say on how City Council members’ salaries are determined, a response to widespread criticism over the 64% raises given to them last year by the city salary commission.

The nine council members used to make about $69,000 per year. That changed in 2023 when their position got a dramatic raise to about $113,000 per year.

Now, the public has a chance to cap council member raises and change the process through which they’re determined.

The charter amendment, which only affects council member salaries not other city employees, would do three things.

It would remove the ability for council members to vote on their own salaries, it would tie council member raises to collective bargaining raises and it would cap council member raises at 5%. Last year’s raise was about 64%. 

Council members voted unanimously to send this version of the charter amendment to November’s ballot. 

City salaries aren’t determined by council members. In the current set up, they just have veto power.

Proposals come from the volunteer Honolulu Salary Commission. Its seven members – which are appointed by council members and the mayor – meet annually to determine salaries for high-ranking officials like council members, the mayor and department heads.

The volunteer commissioners knew their 2023 recommendation would be controversial. But they said it was necessary because salaries had stagnated for years due to structural reasons.

“There’s a conflict that exists about them voting on their own salaries,” commissioner Rebecca Soon said, explaining the stagnation. Council Chair Tommy Waters agrees with that assessment.

Because council members have the ability to veto their own pay raises, they are incentivized to reject the raises because it looks good politically, some commissioners and council members said. 

That’s generally what happened for decades, causing council member salaries to lag as median household incomes rose. 

In 1989, Honolulu’s median household income and council member salaries were both around $35,000. In 2022, median household income had climbed to about $96,000 while council member salaries were about $69,000. 

Other Hawaii counties don’t give council members veto power over their own salaries. The structure Honolulu uses is criticized in a 2018 Stanford Law Review article that surveys how municipalities around the country determine council member compensation.

Kellen Zale, now an associate professor at the University of Houston Law Center, writes in the article that “although a salary increase would boost councilmembers’ welfare in terms of monetary gain, if they think that increasing their own salaries is likely to hurt their chances of reelection, then they may opt not to increase their pay.” 

Over time, that could lead to future elected officials receiving low pay. 

And “while one might intuitively assume that corruption correlates with excessive compensation, low compensation can also raise concerns about corruption and conflicts of interest because councilmembers are more likely to hold outside jobs or seek other forms of remuneration to afford serving in elected office,” she writes. 

Zale also raises the idea of reducing conflicts of interest by using a lottery system of registered voters in the city to choose salary commissioners, even if the commission still includes a few appointees with institutional knowledge. But a lottery system will not be on the ballot this November. 

Soon, who in 2021 was the council’s chief of staff under Waters, said that her experience working in government as well as nonprofits gives her a diverse perspective “on what real people, but also what our government officials need to be supported in the roles that they do.” She thinks increasing citizen participation on the commission would be good, but that it needs to be balanced with keeping institutional knowledge.

Changing all of this requires amending the City Charter, a process that gives voters the final say.

A lack of public input is one critique that opponents leveled in 2023, when Waters refused to hold a discussion on the Salary Commission’s controversial recommendation. If voters pass the charter amendment, the public could testify on proposed council member salaries in the beginning of the calendar year at the Salary Commission’s hearings.

This year, the commission recommended raising council member salaries by about 3.6%. All council members declined to take the raise.