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Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

Greenwood pay raise

Salary increase was way out of line, and the process only confirmed concerns of residents

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Greenwood Township residents are rightfully upset by a town board majority that seems to make up new rules as it goes along. That was the case last week when the town board voted 3-2 at the end of their meeting to grant the clerk an eye-popping salary increase, without any notice to the public that the issue was even under consideration.

Back in March, the town board’s new chairman, Kirsten Reichel, recommended sensible changes in the way the town board conducts its meetings. For a number of years the meetings had grown increasingly free-range, with constant unsolicited public input, which hardly contributed to an efficient handling of township business.

But by limiting public input, the board agreed to assume the responsibility of ensuring that agendas were posted well in advance and that the public had an opportunity to provide input on items once a motion and a second were on the floor. But when it came to approving an unjustified pay increase, one that Reichel knew would be unpopular, the rules that the board had set for itself just months ago were suddenly tossed out the window.

For one, the pay raise was never on the board’s agenda, even though board members were presented with the request prior to the start of last week’s regular meeting. The item should have been added to the agenda at the start of the meeting, an action that is routine at board meetings for every other governmental body in the area. Instead, Reichel raised the request under “supervisor’s reports,” a portion of the meeting usually reserved for final comments or notices from board members.

What’s worse, when Reichel raised the issue and got the motion and second she expected, she refused to allow residents in the audience to speak to the issue. She said she had talked to the township attorney, who had stated that decisions on wages and salaries were “a board-only decision” and that public discussion was inappropriate.

That’s ridiculous. Every decision outside the annual meeting is a board-only decision, yet the board agreed that it would hear from residents whenever seconded motions were on the floor. While the board certainly would want to guard against public discussion of personnel performance (which is private data), that is not the case when it comes to salaries, which is public information. Given that the board’s action amounted to a $12,000-plus expenditure that was never included in the township budget, it certainly was fair game for public input. Town boards, of course, have wide latitude over the ways they run their meetings, so there was nothing illegal in the board’s conduct. But it was a clear violation of the meeting conduct policy, which Reichel herself had advanced, and it certainly confirmed the view held by many in the township that their local government operates with too much secrecy.

Supervisor Gene Baland was right when he asked to postpone action, saying he’d like to study the pay request a bit more before making a final decision. Given that the clerk, Ellen Trancheff, was seeking a pay raise retroactive to January, there was certainly no reason to rush the issue, other than that the three board members who voted in favor might get cold feet if they heard from too many township residents in the interim.

Had board members had time to review the proposal, they might have caught the misleading nature of Trancheff’s request. For one, in calculating her current hourly rate at less than $12/hour, Trancheff overlooked the fact that she’s paid $6,300 above and beyond her official “clerk’s” salary for serving as “911 coordinator” in Greenwood, a minor task, at best, that is routinely included in the base salary of other clerks in the region, or is handled by the county. Add in that separate perk and her part-time job already paid more than $20,000 a year and her hourly rate was over $17 an hour. With her pay raise, she’s now getting over $32,000 a year, with an hourly rate of $27 an hour.

And Reichel didn’t help matters by offering misleading salary comparisons to the town board. She cited the city of Tower’s clerk-treasurer, whose salary works out to about $25/hour, as a fair comparison. Yet Tower’s top job includes the clerk and treasurer position, while the treasurer is a separate paid job in Greenwood. What’s more, Tower’s clerk-treasurer oversees an entire city, including other city workers, streets, water and sewer, an airport, a public campground, ambulance service, police contracts, and more.

Reichel had to have known that it was more appropriate to compare Trancheff’s salary to other township officers, but she declined to investigate those salaries. Had she done so, it would have exposed the board’s pay increase as grossly excessive. Take Morse Township, for example. It’s larger than Greenwood in both area and population, with its own sizeable valuation, offering the same no-frills level of service as Greenwood. Their clerk makes about $9,500 a year.

Some townships do pay quite a bit more. Breitung pays their clerk $17,500 a year, but that’s a township that functions more like a city, with all the streets and sewer and water infrastructure in Soudan, not to mention a police department and a public campground.

Greenwood residents have a right to feel abused by both the scale of the pay increase, as well as the secretive process involved. The town board, simply put, pulled a fast one.