THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 14, 1994 TAG: 9408130086
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 47 lines
Whether cities should have constitutional officers - an elected sheriff, commonwealth's attorney, treasurer, commissioner of the revenue, Circuit Court clerk - is debatable. Whether this city's constitutional officers in the course of their duties run up $3,600 to $4,200 worth of ``annual car allowance'' is not debatable: Auto mileage is provable or disprovable. Political mileage is something else.
Of these five elected officials, only the sheriff and the commonwealth's attorney got car allowances until City Council, on Vice Mayor Sessoms' motion, added the other three during May's budget deliberations. The question arose at that time whether the move was a payoff for political support in the May election. Could be. Could be, too, that Councilman Moss' motion Tuesday to rescind the allowances has some faint retaliatory taint.
Still, these ``allowances'' will chafe, if only because the amounts bore no demonstrated relation to the average citizen's reality when approved, and apparently bear none now. Do any records show some relation between mileage an officer has claimed and the car allowance bestowed? Councilwoman Henley asked, and got none.
The $300 to $350 a month allowances didn't come quite from thin air. Fourteen top city employees are similarly compensated - from the city manager ($500) to the director of parks and recreation ($300) to the director of management and budget ($100). What's the basis for those amounts? Not the 1,200 or more miles at the city's 24-cents-per-mile reimbursement rate that $300 or more a month works out to be. The amount is set more by custom and competitiveness than travel. The actual mileage recipients of monthly car allowances get reimbursed for is their out-of-town trips.
These may well be common and customary ways to boost compensation for executives, public and private. But raises or bonuses - or political payoffs - masquerading as mileage invite the kind of flak and political machinations they're prompting here. It's flak you'd think elected officials who like their jobs would avoid. Members of City Council have to endure the same record-keeping pains most employees do for reimbursement per-mile. Constitutional officers should as well. by CNB