In line with salary bumps from past years, Mayor Catherine Pugh, all 15 Baltimore City Council members, the city comptroller and liquor board members will each be getting paid more starting Jan. 1, 2018.
The mayor’s salary will rise from just shy of $176,000 to about $180,300, according to the agenda for the final Board of Estimates meeting of 2017. Council President Jack Young will see his pay rise from $116,490 to $119,402; Vice President Sharon Green Middleton’s will grow from about $74,900 to $76,760; and the 13 other members of the city council will bump up from $67,756 to $69,450.
Baltimore’s comptroller of 22 years, Joan Pratt, will also get a raise, from around $116,500 to $119,400 per year, as will the city’s liquor board chair ($30,468 to $31,230 and commissioners ($29,943 to $30,692).
The Baltimore Sun’s Luke Broadwater first reported the news.
All 21 city employees’ salary increases come out to 2.5 percent, the standard set by a 2007 law that says they can receive pay increases so long as unionized city employees got some type of raise in the previous fiscal year. The city’s human resources department notes the mayor’s and others’ pending pay raises to the Board of Estimates every year, though it’s not required to do so.
For purposes of comparison, Mayor Pugh’s salary next year will be $20,000 less than what Muriel Bowser, mayor of the similarly sized District of Columbia, made last year. The mayors of Boston and Portland, which both have between 600,000 and 700,000 people, made $175,000 and $138,000 in salary last year, respectively.
