San Diego City Council Back Tracks on Pay Raise

By Alison St John / Reporter, KPBS Public Broadcasting

Published April 22, 2008 at 8:31 AM PDT

The San Diego City Council will not get a pay raise. They let the mayor's veto of their vote for a raise stand. However, they voted to keep their car allowance. KPBS reporter Alison St John has more.

San Diego City Council members make $75,000 a year. A member of the salary setting commission released a list showing more than 3,000 San Diego city employees earned more than that last year, that's about a third of all city employees. However, after the political outcry over last week's vote in favor of a raise, the council back tracked and turned it down.

Phil Hart was one resident who addressed the council.

Hart: If you want a raise you have to earn it and clearly most people in this city feel that this council as well as previous councils have not earned that consideration.

Councilman Kevin Faulconer proposed the council also stop taking a fixed car allowance of $9,000 a year, which would have effectively reduced their salaries. However that motion failed.

Half the council members said they would stop taking the car allowance anyway and let that money go back in their council office budgets.

Alison St John KPBS News.

Alison St John

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Alison St John currently serves as a general assignment reporter and occasionally co-hosts KPBS Midday Edition. She fell in love with KPBS Radio when she arrived in San Diego in 1985 and first heard NPR. She has been a voice on KPBS Radio since 1989, and has served as a news reporter for radio, TV and the web, as well as anchoring, hosting, producing and editing. Alison has reported on stories about North County and was based in the KPBS' North County Bureau. Alison covered the metro beat during the critical period of the San Diego City pension crisis, and the education beat while Alan Bersin was the controversial Superintendent of San Diego City School District. She covered health when the industry was converting to managed care and told welfare reform stories in the late 1990s when Clinton was “ending welfare as we know it.” She has covered land use issues extensively, looking at the challenges of meeting a growing population while preserving community character, and developing a better transportation system to meet environmental concerns. She has done many stories on the military in San Diego, and the series she edited on the challenges veterans face returning from active duty to civilian life won “Best of Show” from the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists. She occasionally hosts the KPBS Roundtable and KPBS Midday Edition. Alison has won awards from the San Diego Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press TV and Radio Association, and the California Golden Mike Awards. Alison was born in Tanzania, brought up in Scotland, and earned her degree in psychology and sociology from Durham University in England. Her postgraduate diploma is in student counseling. She worked in England, Nigeria, Switzerland, Belgium, India, and Japan before moving to the United States in 1981. She now lives in Oceanside and enjoys how her community is growing and changing.