A 20% pay hike for Indianola’s mayor, along with a bump in salary for the aldermen, may soon be on the table for discussion.
An item appeared on an early copy of last week’s agenda that called for discussion of raising the mayor’s salary from $49,500 to $62,000. Mayor Ken Featherstone, who took office on Jan. 4, removed that item, but he does still intend to bring it before the board.
Featherstone told The Enterprise-Tocsin this week that he does not view the bump in terms of a raise but rather restoring the salary to where it once stood.
“With the new administration coming in, that would be the ideal time to make the move,” Featherstone said, noting concerns about the request coming just weeks after him taking office.
“At what point during a four-year term is something like this supposed to come up?”
The position’s salary was indeed once $62,000, albeit for just a couple of years, until it was reduced again back in 2010.
“I wasn’t exactly clear on why Mayor (Steve) Rosenthal elected to pull that 20% out of there until I read the article and brushed up on exactly why that was,” Featherstone said.
The large increase happened in September 2007, under the Arthur Marble administration. His raise, along with a bump to $10,000 a year for the aldermen, was met with swift backlash from the community, but the salaries stood until Rosenthal was sworn in in January 2010.
Rosenthal was a vocal critic of the move at the time, and during his first meeting 12 years ago, he introduced a measure reducing the mayor’s salary by 20% to $49,600. The aldermen also took a pay cut that night, according to The E-T’s coverage at the time.
Featherstone had not included a raise for the aldermen in his original item, but he said after researching the subject, he’s open to talking about restoring that 2007 level for them as well.
“I suppose there should be consideration, if I read the article correctly back from 2010 that the mayor and aldermen gave that 20% back, it should not be for the mayor but for the aldermen as well,” he said.
A 20% annual increase - amounting to roughly $12,000 for the mayor – is a sizable amount, but it would not make Featherstone the highest paid mayor for a town Indianola’s size (population 9,646, according to the 2020 U.S. Census).
In fact, according to data from the Mississippi Municipal League’s Municipal Salary Survey from 2021, salaries for mayors, both part-time and full-time, vary throughout the state.
The average salary for a mayor with a population of 5,000-9,999 is $55,182, according to MML, and aldermen in those towns make an average annual salary of $12,895.
Indianola’s aldermen make just under $8,000 a year, according to the survey.
Bay St. Louis (population 9,259) pays a full-time mayor $80,000 a year, and New Albany (population 8,526) pays its part-time mayor $85,174.
Diamondhead, a town of just over 8,000, pays a full-time mayor $15,000, according to MML, while Flowood, a town of just under 8,000, pays its mayor $27,000 a year.
Nearby Batesville, a town of 7,463, pays its part-time mayor just over the state average at $56,760, while Louisville, a town of 6,631, pays its mayor $82,308, the survey said.
Featherstone said the city is talking about conducting a “budget analysis” which would look at ways to cover the cost of the raise, or raises, but he feels strongly that the city is in good enough financial shape to absorb at least the mayor’s portion of the pay bump.
“We are at a surplus in our budget,” Featherstone said. “We are not in the red. We are not really pressed for anything financially, so it just seems like now would be the time to do it.”
This past summer, the city of Clarksdale received a lot of media attention after Mayor Chuck Espy and the city’s board of commissioners awarded themselves large raises, making Espy’s salary larger than the governor’s at the time at $122,421. The board members’ salaries rose from $26,650 to $46,650.
Featherstone said he is not looking to request anything of that magnitude but is rather requesting a salary that already existed previously, stating that a cost of living raise for the position is warranted.
“There’s a cost of living increase,” he said. “We’re dealing with a little recession right now. It would be befitting just to get that salary back to where it was in 2010.”
The board will meet this coming Monday at 7 p.m.
