On April 14, the Port Townsend City Council alerted the public it would be going into executive session to discuss the comparable salaries for City Manager John Mauro. That followed the city’s decision last month, conveyed by Director of Public Works Steve King who serves as acting city manager in Mauro’s absence, to keep the written evaluations confidential. 

Numeric ratings of the city manager — all of them very high — have been provided to the public while in years past written reviews were provided. 

We think both of those decisions contradict Washington state law. The most recent decision, announced on April 14, has to do with Open Public Meetings Act, RCW 42.30.110(1)(g). It permits executive sessions to evaluate the qualifications of an applicant for public employment or to review the performance of a public employee but the statute doesn’t stop there. 

“Discussion by a governing body of salaries, wages, and other conditions of employment to be generally applied within the agency shall occur in a meeting open to the public, and when a governing body elects to take final action hiring, setting the salary of an individual employee or class of employees, or discharging or disciplining an employee, that action shall be taken in a meeting open to the public.”

Executive sessions, when misused, allow critical public decisions — like how much taxpayer money is spent on top officials — to happen behind closed doors. That erodes public trust and weakens accountability. The exchange on the topic at the city council meeting, reported in the April 16 Leader, began with members of city council addressing an inadequate staff-prepared salary comparison chart. 

The chart included 2024 salary ranges of four city managers from Washington cities, salary ranges of four city administrators, and salary information for the administrator of Jefferson County, the Port of Port Townsend, Jefferson PUD, and Jefferson Healthcare. The chart didn’t list specific positions for those organizations, and the line item for the Port Townsend Paper Mill did not include a salary.  

Both Libby Wennstrom and Monica MickHager, members of the city Council, criticized the last city finance manager who was tasked with filling it out but left for another job without doing so. And they asked for more information.  

“It’s hard to get an apples-to-apples comparison; having more data makes that make more sense,” said Wennstrom. “I know this is kind of a hot-button issue at this point, and I want to feel like I have good information in order to make some decisions.” Wennstrom said she would do some research online. 

Monica MickHager said she’d like to see some examples of salaries from around the country.

Wennstrom suggested govsalaries.com but probably didn’t know that the website states it strictly prohibits the use of the information “to make any determinations concerning employment, consumer credit, insurance, tenant screening, or any other purpose that would require FCRA compliance.” The website also states it does not guarantee it is “100% accurate or complete.”

Past councils made written evaluations of the top manager available to the public, recognizing the importance of transparency in evaluating top leadership. That practice has quietly changed without clear explanation.

Staff was directed to improve on the list. Jodi Adams, the city’s finance and technology services director, said she would present counsel with the Association of Washington Cities salary survey report, which includes population figures and city manager salaries across the state. Because the report is only available to members of the association” they would need to review it in executive session. (The data is also available online to anyone willing to pay for it.) 

If the city wants to protect the AWC data, it can provide salary summaries in the private individual packets created for members of city council outside of public purview. That way individual members could review it privately before the public meeting — without need for executive session. Transparency doesn’t require violating copyright — it requires effort and intent.

Luckily, The Leader already compiled a chart, first published on Feb. 19 and reprinted here. We drilled down salaries of city managers in Washington, thinking apples-to-apples was the way to go. To that end, the reporter purposely omitted city administrators, since that is technically a different job, as well as non-government leadership positions. 

To gather the information, every city in Washington with fewer than 20,000 residents or less was contacted. (Port Townsend is in the middle with about 10,500 residents.) To add context, in addition to salary information the reporter gathered population, median income, and the size of the city’s budget.

The Public Records Act (RCW 42.56) also deserves mention here. It makes no broad exemption for performance evaluations of public employees — particularly appointed executives like city managers. Our understanding is that courts have consistently held that these evaluations are public records, with only limited redactions allowed in rare cases.

We’re keen on keeping the community informed on this topic in part because Mauro’s salary hikes in recent years slipped through the cracks. This news organization continued to report that he made $189,297 — the sum in 2022 — and it came as a surprise to many that it had risen by $41,000.

At least one member of city council thinks we’re doing so unfairly. They told us their job has been “less rewarding” since The Leader began covering the city government full time.

My response is fairly basic: Scrutiny from the local paper comes with the territory of holding elected office.

More to the point, we’re going to continue to pursue transparency, whether seeking public information on a timely basis or pushing council council to limit what it does in executive session. That’s our job. 

Reach Meredith Jordan at editor@ptleader.com.