City Manager Employment Agreement

Lakewood’s City Manager Employment Agreement is publicly available. A comparison below shows some of the employment agreement changes throughout the current City Manager’s tenure, along with some considerations that may be taken into account when evaluating a public servant contract.

A quick glance at the chart below shows that the City Manager’s base salary has risen by $93,000 in 13 years, an almost 50% raise or 3.7% per year. Paid time off, health benefits and retirement have also risen. Retirement benefits started with the same benefits as regular employees plus one year of severance, and have risen to all of that plus a defined benefit from the City Manager’s Retirement Pension Plan plus maybe more. (The money purchase pension benefits may be continued through 2014 agreement, unclear.)

*Stated during Dec 19 City Council meeting

**The extra retirement benefit is ambiguous. Read the highlighted section below and see what you think. There seems to be a new benefit in the event of retirement (which the City Manager now qualifies for).

Comments from council during the meeting indicated that the item of most interest was length of tenure of employee and population of city. Analysis of duties included, such as city-wide waste and/or water, was not included.

Other items of interest shown in the chart below include that the City Manager makes at least 4x the base salary of the average Lakewood resident and city employee. At the same time, the community survey shows resident satisfaction with city services is decreasing.

Sources:

Overall satisfaction with city services

Average city employee salary

$56,000 (2022)

$65,000 (2022)

**The extra retirement benefit is ambiguous.

~Corrections:

1/19/23 to remove salary increases were mostly due to salary surveys.