The paycheck that comes with being San Luis Obispo mayor will almost double next January—a move approved by the City Council in response to the increased workload and time commitments demanded by public service.
At its Jan. 13 meeting, the City Council unanimously voted to adopt new pay rates based on recommendations by a city council compensation committee.
“I was a mayor for six years, and I can tell you I didn’t do it for the money,” City Councilmember Jan Marx said at the meeting. “However, the thing about being mayor is that you can’t work harder, you can’t get up earlier, or stay up later, or become more efficient and still do your duties because there’s irreducible chunks of time where people just want the mayor to be there. A lot of it is ceremonial.”
Appointed by the City Council last year, the compensation committee—comprising former Councilmember Andy Pease, personnel board representative Jill LeMieux, and residents Erin Foote, Kari Howell, Trent Johnson, Barry Price, and Joyce Tseng—recommended raising the mayor’s monthly salary from $2,923 to $4,864. They also suggested upping council members’ monthly pay from $2,319 to $2,780.
The committee arrived at that rate based on the most current median household income of $66,711 for the city from the U.S. Census, pro-rated to 20 hours per week for council members and 35 hours per week for the mayor. The city’s general fund will cover the compensation.
SLO’s last compensation committee assembled in 2020. A committee wasn’t formed in 2022. Instead, the city adopted a resolution setting a biennial Consumer Price Index increase to the City Council, the Planning Commission, and the Architectural Review Commission.
In 2024, the City Council approved a CPI increase of 8.3 percent to monthly compensations that raised the amounts to their current pay.
The SLO City Council, overseeing a population of 47,000 residents, not including Cal Poly students, has consistently been the highest paid compared to other cities in SLO County. With council positions almost demanding the hours of a full-time job, Mayor Erica Stewart told New Times that better compensation could encourage a diverse set of people to run for local office.
“How do we remove the barriers so that everyone that wants to be part of government in this way—if they wish to represent the community and be involved, that they can be?” Stewart said. “Some people can’t even consider it because financially, they need to work and make so many dollars, and an 8-to-5 job doesn’t really lend well to being a council member.”
As a City Council member since 2018 and mayor since 2022, Stewart added that her work deepened as she gained more knowledge and information about local issues. She juggles her mayoral duties and positions on regional and advisory committees with the public speaking and organizational behavior classes she teaches at Cal Poly.
Often, that means she must make hard decisions about which tasks to prioritize.
“I have final presentations [at Cal Poly] the same day that there is the state of downtown in March, so other people have to be representing the city for me because I will not be able to be there,” Stewart said. “I have been at a couple of [city-related] conferences where I will teach asynchronously or on Zoom instead. When I had my other job, pretty much 90 percent of my vacation days were taking off work so I could be at council meetings or the regional meetings I’m part of, or at a conference for all of the cities.”
Charter capabilities
SLO is a charter city, unlike all the other cities in the county, which are general law ones. While general law cities must follow state laws around council compensation, charter cities like SLO can set their own rules.
Under SLO’s charter, the city must review compensation for its mayor and council members every other year in even-numbered years. Consumer Price Index increases are applied to City Council, Planning Commission, and Architectural Review Commission salaries every other year, and these raises aren’t subject to compensation committee review.
As a charter city, SLO also could add more members to its five-person City Council, Cal Poly political science professor Michael Latner told New Times, in the vein of San Francisco’s 11-member and Los Angeles’ 15-member city councils.
“As a political scientist, the thing that stands out the most to me about the SLO City Council is not so much their current pay grade but the fact that there are so few of them,” Latner said. “The SLO City Council is very small given the population of the city of San Luis Obispo, and given the responsibilities that they have as a city, I would like to see more council members added, which could improve the division of labor among the sitting council members.”
According to the city, only voters can approve a change to the city’s charter, which prescribes the number of elected officials SLO can have—one mayor and four council members.
Corruption concern
The voter initiative process could be activated, Latner said, to approve elected officials’ salary increases if the public is concerned about corruption.
“There certainly is at least the appearance of something unsavory happening when you have politicians raising their own salaries,” he said. “So, in the future, if there could be a permanent or even a committee that meets once a decade to review these sorts of things, it’s probably better to do that.”
A 2014 study by UC San Diego found that salary had no effect on corruption, fiscal policy, or a politician’s quality. A World Bank Group study in 2021 observed that increasing the wages of public officials could help reduce corruption in countries with low public sector wage inequality, though corruption could rise in countries where public sector wages are highly unequal.
“It’s harder to buy a politician if they have a salary that’s high enough so that they can be immune to bribery,” Latner said. “One of the clearest cases of this is the highest-paid bureaucrats in the world come from the country of Singapore. They’re what we would think of as secretary-level positions, and they all make over $1 million a year. But Singapore is also regularly ranked as one of the least corrupt governments in the world.”
When it comes to other city councils that serve larger populations than SLO—like neighboring Santa Maria with its 112,200 residents—those city councils should be paid more to level the playing field, Latner added.
Santa Maria’s mayor receives roughly $1,950, while its City Council members get $1,700 every month.
“In City Councils where it’s either considered part-time or almost volunteer work, there’s not much payment,” Latner said. “You typically only get candidates that are self-financed. One of the reasons you want to pay representatives a professional level salary is so that you’re not just getting wealthy people running for office because they’re the only ones who can afford to do it.”
Another outlook
To Atascadero Mayor Charles Bourbeau, that kind of safeguard could work theoretically but not in practice. Being paid a professional-level salary would dim the “purity of purpose” that comes with public service duties.
“If you increase the compensation or not, people still have to have the time to do it, and that lends itself towards retirees and self-employed people,” he said. “If you’re young and have children and you’re constantly telling your spouse that, ‘Oh yeah, I got a council meeting this Tuesday night,’ you know, it’s not super conducive.”
Bourbeau is now the only retiree on the Atascadero City Council. The other council members are self-employed. He credits retirement for giving him more time to delve into city matters, but his timetable looked different in the late 1980s when he was both a council member and full-time National Guard officer.
“I was the only one working a regular job, and I know that I spent less time doing my job as a City Council member than the others because I couldn’t just bail out any afternoon or something to go do this other thing,” he said. “Now it’s the reverse.”
Bourbeau now receives $750 a month in compensation, and Atascadero council members get $600 a month on top of health benefits. The City Council last approved a pay increase in 2014 when council member compensation was around $300. Prior to that, the previous pay raise happened around 20 years ago, according to Bourbeau.
“There’s no point in having a council compensation committee because this issue only comes up at least every 10 years,” he said. “It’s not something I’m interested in right now because I donate all my City Council earnings to charity. I do this for public service.”
Bourbeau also doesn’t accept health benefits through the city, since he’s covered by his retirement.
“I just figure I’m saving the city a chunk of money by me not taking the benefits,” he said with a laugh. “I will say I do take the dental.” ∆
Reach Staff Writer Bulbul Rajagopal at brajagopal@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Feb 5-12, 2026.