McALLEN, Texas (Border Report) — A trio of city councilmembers from the South Texas border city of Laredo are upset over a recent vote by the council to increase council pay by 40%.
Laredo City Councilmember Melissa Cigarroa, her niece Councilmember Alyssa Cigarroa and Councilmember Dr. Tyler King are asking Mayor Dr. Victor Treviño to veto the Sept. 16 vote that was approved by 5-3, with the three members above voting against it.
They’re also asking for public feedback by signing a petition at this link.
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The vote gave the mayor a $25,200 pay bump, making his annual salary $100,200. Each councilmember will get an additional $19,200, bringing their pay to $69,800, including reimbursements.
The Sept. 16 vote included a change to the city’s ordinance, but Melissa Cigarroa told Border Report on Monday that during that meeting and the previous Sept. 3 council meeting — when the issue was first discussed — the term “pay raise” was never mentioned.
“This was not presented as a salary increase. This was presented as a change in the language of the ordinance to make it more clear and transparent, which is laughable, in my opinion,” Melissa Cigarroa told Border Report. “Our city attorney never told us that our pay would be raised in his presentation. So had myself, Councilmember King and Councilmember Alyssa Cigarroa not spoken up and discussed how this is a de facto salary increase, no one would have been any the wiser.”
She says it was presented as amending a 2016 ordinance that set council compensation and this bump will allow for reimbursements of cell phone, car and home office expenses for councilmembers. But she tells Border Report that she has since learned that the ordinance actually was amended in 2019 and that had never been discussed with them.
The first pay increases were included in the Sept. 30 payments to the council and Cigarroa, who is a first-term councilmember, said she did not accept it.
Cigarroa also says the changes to the ordinance do not take effect until January, and that is after the election for three council seats. She says the city’s laws are written that way to prevent sitting city councilmembers from voting themselves in pay raises.
She says this also “violates an ethics ordinance that tells us we can’t be voting for financial gain for us.”
Cigarroa feels “deceived” and said she believes presenting arguments by Laredo City Attorney Doanh “Zone” Nguyen were “insincere.”
“In any other job, you go before your boss, you say, I would like a raise, and then you justify why, but you don’t get to decide if you get that raise. The boss decides. In our case, the public is our boss,” she said.
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Mayor Treviño told the Laredo Morning Times he will consider taking veto action. “However, as mayor, I find it difficult to comprehend how these three councilmembers are asking me to veto a 5 to 3 vote because they feel that it’s an unjust compensation issue and they did not ask me to veto when they all signed up for the pension for life, reserved for employees that have worked for the city 20 years,” he told the newspaper.
Cigarro said Treviño opted out of the city’s pension because he is of an age to collect Social Security and he cannot collect from two government sources. She says the city’s pension is relatively small and the mayor chose the other option.
She added that under the revised pay scale, Laredo city councilmembers are receiving more compensation than San Antonio city councilmembers who oversee a $4 billion annual budget for 2.5 million residents.
Laredo has about 260,000 residents and an annual budget of $980 million.
Sandra Sanchez can be reached at SSanchez@BorderReport.com.
