The City Council is barreling ahead with a bill to give local elected officials pay raises, scheduling a hearing on it for later this month — even as the two politicians with the most say on the matter, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and incoming Council Speaker Julie Menin, remain tight-lipped on where they stand.
Introduced last week by Queens Councilwoman Nantasha Williams, the bill would give five-digit raises to Council members, the mayor, the comptroller and the public advocate as well as the city’s borough presidents and district attorneys. Those officials haven’t received raises since 2016, so backers of Williams’ legislation say wage bumps are overdue.
The plan was initially for the Council to vote on the bill before the end of 2025, as first reported by the Daily News. But the Council backpedaled and put off any vote until January at the earliest due to a City Charter restriction prohibiting the body from pushing through raises in the lame duck period of an election year.
Nonetheless, the Council on Wednesday penciled in a hearing on the bill for Dec. 16 in the chamber’s Governmental Operations Committee, records show.
The bill will need to be reintroduced next year no matter what as it is a new legislative session. But Williams previously told The News the hope is to hold a hearing on the measure and take other requisite legislative steps this year so it can be reintroduced in 2026 as a so-called “pre-considered resolution,” which would allow it to be moved immediately to a vote.
Still, Wednesday’s scheduling move comes as Menin — who last week declared victory in the race to become the Council’s next speaker — has refrained from adding her name as a co-sponsor to the pay raise bill, records show.
Menin’s selection as speaker still needs to be formalized with a vote by all of the Council’s 51 members in January, but as long as she passes that process, she will get the chamber’s top spot — a perch that would give her decisive say over whether the pay raise bill will even get a vote in 2026.
Menin declined to comment on why she has kept her name off the bill.
Sources familiar with her thinking said Menin is supportive of giving local elected officials taxpayer-funded raises and expected next year to add her name behind an effort to implement wage hikes.
However, the sources said she has kept her name off the current iteration of the bill because she has lingering legal concerns about it being advanced in this year’s lame duck period. The sources also said Menin would prefer that, before any official action is taken, a commission be empaneled to study what sort of levels the raises should be.
If passed by the Council, any pay raise bill would need approval from the mayor to immediately become law. But Mamdani, who’s being sworn in as mayor on Jan. 1 after running a campaign centered on making the city more affordable, has refrained from saying where he stands on the pay raise bill.
“I’m not worried about the hypotheticals at this time,” Mamdani told reporters Monday when asked whether he supports the bill.
A rep for Mamdani, who will as mayor have the power to veto bills passed by the Council, declined to comment further Wednesday.
The pay raise matter is likely to become a headache for Mamdani no matter what position he takes. He’s likely to anger Council members if he tries to block it, but potentially draw the ire of the public if he supports it.
Under Williams’ bill, Mamdani would get a mayoral salary of $300,500 per year, up from the current $258,000. As speaker, Menin would under the bill earn $191,000 annually, up from the current $164,000, while other Council members would start earning $172,500, up from the current $148,000.
Under existing law, the mayor is every four years supposed to empanel a commission to study whether pay raises for elected officials are necessary. But ex-Mayor Bill de Blasio never convened one in 2020 due to the pandemic, and outgoing Mayor Eric Adams skipped empaneling one in 2024 without offering a reason.
Grace Rauh, executive director of the Citizens Union, argued it’s nonetheless inappropriate for the Council to circumvent the commission system. She suggested it’s better for the next Council to pass a bill giving the speaker the power to convene the commission and then act on recommendations presented by such a panel.
“The bar here shouldn’t be whether something meets the letter of the law in the Charter, it should be whether this is the right way of getting a pay raise, and the answer is it’s clearly not,” Rauh said Wednesday evening.
With Josephine Stratman
