06.15.20 MEETING MINUTES - Laserfiche WebLink

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Minutes of the Regular Meeting of Council Monday, June 15, 2020 Page 12 Council President Schutt stated, thank you Mr. Coyne. Any other comments? Mayor Bodnar stated, thank you Council President. You have all received my memo -relative to Ordinance 2020-12 and as Mr. Coyne mentioned, you received some information that he and Mrs. Betsa prepared. I am not going to repeat what is said in them. I do want to mention that I have had someone indicate to me that the numbers used in the chart provided may be a little bit out of date. Some of those figures may have increased since the time this was prepared. I have not had time to go back and check that out. Like I said, I don't want to repeat everything that's in my memo but I do want to highlight some things which I feel are of very important considerations. First, the way this is structured, after 3 reads, Council will decide on whether or not to send this to the voters for them to decide. That's different than what happened back in 2017. Some of you were on Council then, some of you were not. But what happened in January 2017 was that Council considered enacting an ordinance that would give themselves health insurance benefits without going to the voters. The Mayfield Village Charter provides "The Council shall not increase the compensation for itself or the Mayor from and after the effective date of this amendment unless such increase in compensation has been enacted by ordinance and submitted to the electorate for approval by a majority vote thereon." Despite that language in the Charter, Council had received a legal opinion, not from Mr. Coyne, which indicated that it could enact an ordinance granting health insurance benefits to itself without going to the voters for approval. Well this caused quite a stir in Mayfield Village. Villagers came to the Caucus meeting in January 2017 and in fact packed the Council meeting that month and they cried fowl over the proposed ordinance because it would have violated our Charter. In addition, some others at that meeting expressed the belief that Council also should not receive benefits. Had it been approached initially with the intent of sending it to the voters, the voters could have decided that issue. However, the outrage generated over the idea that voter approval was not needed despite clear language of the Charter left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths and really put to rest any thought of regenerating that ordinance and sending it to the ballot for a vote. Second, the ordinance that you are considering, 2020-12, is not about me. It is about setting fair compensation for the work, skill, education and experience required for the job in the 21 st Century. The Charter does not designate whether the job of Mayor is full-time or part-time. What it does do is set forth a long laundry list, a detailed list, of what the Mayor's and Council's duties or responsibilities are. As Mr. Coyne mentioned, this list includes the Mayor as Chief Conservative of the Peace within the municipality in causing all ordinances and laws to be enforced therein. This position, sometimes referred to as Safety Director, is as Tony mentioned, often compensated separately by other municipalities. It is not compensated separately here. Going forward, I want Mayfield Village to have strong choices for leadership in the future. Not only is the compensation package set forth in the ordinance moderate in comparison to other local communities, but I believe it will help to attract strong candidates to consider running for public office in the future. Finally, 'while we are indeed in the midst of COVID-19, Mayfield Village is sound and we are doing well. Thanks to conservative planning, budgeting and careful spending, we have very strong reserves, so much so that we did not hesitate to hire three new Firefighter/Paramedics. We pay