Grace Rauh (Citizens Union) Testifies on Salary Bill

And the next panel is Grace Rao from Citizens Union and Rachel Faust from Revent Albany.

And I want to thank Grace Rao's interns.

I'm very supportive of interns.

Sometimes I like them better than staff.

Whoever would like to begin, go ahead.

Thank you.

Good morning, Chair Brewer, members of the commission.

My name is Grace Rao, members of the council committee, excuse me.

My name is Grace Rao.

I'm the executive director of Citizens Union, a nonpartisan good government group that has worked to advance honest, accountable, and effective government and fair and open elections in New York.

In New York for nearly 130 years.

I want to thank Chair, the Chair of the Quadrennial Advisory Commission and the members of the commission.

We supported its establishment through advocacy and testimony because we believe periodic reviews of elected officials'compensation are essential to good government

and because we felt that the 10-year salary freeze was unsustainable.

We want to thank the council for incorporating nearly all of the commission's recommendations, including most of our own recommendations to the commission and to this proposed bill and for bringing it to the public hearing today.

We do support the bill, but I want to flag that we are concerned about the proposed automatic inflation-adjusted salary increases.

as a backstop when a commission is not convened.

So my written testimony has more details, but I'll go through some of it now.

At a high level, we support increasing all elected officials'salaries by 18.2%.

Our longstanding position is that elected officials should be well compensated.

Competitive salaries attract strong candidates, enable individuals who are not independently wealthy to pursue public service, reduce incentives for corruption, and signal the importance of public service.

The proposed increase reflects those goals, and we support it.

We also support restoring the quadrennial advisory commission cycle to the third year of the term, with the next commission set to be established in 2028.

We support codifying prospective salary recommendations, and we support extending the commission's timeframe from 75 days to 120 days.

On the establishment of automatic inflation-adjusted salary increases, if no commission is convened, we are opposed to that change.

Citizens Union does not recommend adopting the backstop mechanism proposed by the commission and incorporated into this bill.

We fully support establishing a mechanism to ensure that quadrennial advisory commissions are convened in a timely manner so that we can prevent another decade-long salary.

However, we're concerned that the proposed approach would effectively eliminate the incentive to convene quadrennial advisory commissions in the future.

And we think the commission-based review process is preferable to an automatic adjustment for two principled reasons.

First, salary reviews involve qualitative considerations that cannot be captured through an inflation adjustment alone.

Don't pay attention to them.

Thank you.

I feel free.

And second, pay commissions serve as vehicles for broader institutional reform, not merely salary recommendations.

In 2025, the commission's recommendations resulted in the ban on outside earned income, the elimination of council lulus, and other significant reforms.

Commissions have also advanced recommendations related to transparency and accountability, and we're concerned that eliminating the incentive to convene commissions would diminish an important mechanism for improving government.

Finally, the bill appears to provide that the automatic salary adjustment would take effect even if a quadrennial advisory commission were convened.

This may be a drafting error and something to look at more closely, but that's another flag for us.

So we recommend amending the bill to authorize another citywide election.

officials, such as city controller, to appoint a quadrennial advisory commission if the mayor fails to do so by the statutory deadline.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.