CLEVELAND, Ohio - Mayor Frank Jackson intends to raise the minimum wage that the city pays its workers to $15 an hour by April 2018, a move meant to raise up the earning power of the bottom end of the workforce.

The change would affect as many as 500 employees in a wide array of jobs, ranging from clerical and custodial staff to park and recreation workers to police and fire cadets. The workers are both full time and part time, union and non-union.

The proposal would pay city employees the minimum hourly rate that was the subject of a hotly debated change sought for both public and private employers citywide last year by Raise Up Cleveland and the Service Employees International Union. Jackson opposed that proposal, saying that limiting the wage hike to just Cleveland would hurt the city economically.

This plan wasn't proposed in response to that effort, Jackson said. It is consistent, though, with his belief that those at the lower end of the income scale should be paid more.

"This is our attempt to be in line with what we believe in," Jackson said Monday.

Why now?

For the $15 hourly wage to apply across the board, it must be negotiated into the labor agreements the city has with 34 unions. The administration has begun that process. Jackson hopes to implement the new minimum wage by next April, which corresponds with the third and final year of those agreements.

The current contracts already have raises built into them. Jackson's plan would bump up the minimum to $15 an hour for any jobs that are still below that rate after those raises take effect.

Who will benefit?

A broad range of workers are paid less than $15 an hour. Among them are police, fire and EMS cadets, some clerical staff, custodial workers, aides, lifeguards at city pools and other recreation workers.

Those workers haven't benefited nearly as greatly as Ohio's top wage earners. Income tax changes haven't generated large dollars for the working poor. Meanwhile, increases to the state sales tax hit them harder.

"There's been more and more tax relief on the affluent and more and more tax burdens on the poor, particularly the working poor," Jackson said. For city workers, this action would help to counter some of that burden shifting.

"When you don't have a lot of money ... just a few dollars can make a big difference," Jackson said.

About 500 employees would qualify for a bump in pay. That's less than 10 percent of the city's total workforce of nearly 7,200 people.

Most of the workers have part-time jobs, but there are some full-time workers who would benefit, too.

Extending the rate to seasonal workers would require action by City Council. They are currently covered by an ordinance that caps their pay at the city's living wage.

That currently is $10 an hour. Ohio's minimum wage is $8.15 an hour.

What will the pay raise cost?

Raising everyone to at least $15 an hour would cost a maximum of about $1.9 million a year, the Jackson administration said.

That total will be pushed down considerably, though. It represents the increase in wage costs to move all workers up to $15 an hour from their current rates. But some of those workers are scheduled for raises between now and April under the terms of the labor agreements.

Those are costs the city would incur regardless.

How does this affect the citywide proposal?

The effort to set a citywide minimum wage was thwarted when the state legislature voted that only the state could set a minimum wage that covered private employers. City leaders had opposed enacting a higher minimum wage just for Cleveland and lobbied the legislature to pass the bill.

A Franklin County judge recently declared that legislation violated Ohio's constitutional requirement that bills address only one subject. His ruling struck down the state's bar on city's enacting minimum wage limits.

Backers of the Cleveland proposal withdrew their initiative petitions early this year. The city's position is that the petitioners would have to gather new signatures from registered Cleveland voters to start the process again.

Jackson on Monday said he still opposes that proposal. Unless the $15 rate were applied outside of the city borders, too, it would hurt Cleveland employment, he said.

He favors raising the minimum wage statewide.

And while he is steadfast that his plan for city workers wasn't inspired by the Raise Up Cleveland effort, he acknowledges that his $15 an hour wage figure came from that movement.

"I picked $15 because that's what people were talking about," he said.

What do the mayor's election challengers say?

Jackson's election challengers generally said they thought city workers should be paid a livable wage, but they also questioned the timing of his decision and whether it was a move to secure votes in November's election.

"To me it looks on the surface like politics," Councilman Zack Reed said. He called for Jackson to show leadership on the issue and join with other big-city mayors to help push a minimum wage increase onto the state ballot in 2018.

"That would show that this is not just political," Reed said.

Brandon Chrostowski, founder of EDWIN's Leadership & Restaurant Institute, labeled it as pandering.

"Every week he promises to plug a leak that should have been fixed 9 years ago and now he dangles this carrot in the faces of city workers as some sort of quid pro quo," Chrostowski said. "I believe strongly that the voters of this city have had just about enough of the mayor's ineffective leadership as well as his sad attempts to play catch up in the 11th hour of his political career.

"At the rate he's going, I wouldn't be surprised to see him promise us Tom Brady in a Brown's uniform right before the primary," Chrostowski said.

Councilman Jeff Johnson noted his long support for boosting the minimum wage in the city On this issue, he said, he agrees with boosting the city worker pay. But he, too, questioned the motivations.

"I think it's an insincere effort to get some advantage during the election," Johnson said. "I totally support the raising of $15 an hour for city workers. I've always believed in that. I've always stated that."

Entrepreneur Tony Madalone criticized Jackson for injecting politics into the issue.



"This city needs a leader that will make decisions in the best interest of the people proactively.," Madalone said. "Why now? 'I picked $15 because that's what people were talking about,' he said. That's not leadership, that's politics."



Robert Kilo saw it as purely a move for votes.



"Today's announcement can't be taken seriously because it is so clearly a political payoff for support and is what you get when politics is a higher priority than city planning," Kilo said. "If this mayor thought a taxpayer-funded wage increase was such a good idea for city workers he would have been fighting for it a long time ago. It's amazing to me that the mayor can find it in his heart to pay off city workers but we can't fill potholes or keep our streets safe."

And Bill Patmon, a state representative and former City Council member, said he'd be concerned about the long-term cost.

"Is it sustainable over time?" Patmon said. "The last thing you want to do is create a financial crisis."

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