San Francisco’s supervisors will be getting a 12% raise this year, more than three times the size of those being given to other elected officials and city employees.

The raise was approved by a 3-1 vote of the Civil Service Commission on Monday and represents a $15,016 pay hike, bringing the board members’ salaries to $140,148 this year — plus benefits.

“I felt the boost was appropriate to bring the pay more in line with the responsibilities of the job,” said Commission President F.X. Crowley, a former labor leader who ran for the board himself in 2012.

The supervisors’ pay hike, however, was far above the $5,005-a-year raise recommended by the Civil Service Commission staff.

The staff report, which surveyed cities and counties statewide, recommended they receive the same 4% raise this fiscal year as other city workers and elected officials — that would have given them about $125,000, plus benefits. Most city workers are getting 11% spread out over three years.

Instead, the commission voted to give the supervisors the 12% boost this year, with annual cost-of-living increases in succeeding years.

Under the City Charter, every five years the commission sets the salary for the supervisors and other elected officials.

Given that the annual cost-of-living increase has been running at about 3% a year, the supervisors could see a total pay raise of 24% or more over the next five years.

In a surprise move, Board of Supervisors clerk Angela Calvillo presented the commission with the salary survey she requested from a Board of Supervisors budget and legislative analyst.

The survey compared the supervisors’ pay to supervisors in other counties. The analyst also measured their pay in relation to the counties’ overall budget.

Calvillo said she did not share the report with the board.

Crowley said he looked at both surveys and concluded the commission staff’s recommendation was “artificially low” for a county with an annual $11 billion budget.

“That’s a billion dollars a supervisor,” Crowley said. “We want professionals making professional decisions.”

The other counties surveyed by the board have five supervisors — San Francisco’s has 11.

Another issue was that, given the city’s annual upticks in pay, the supervisors’ staffers may have soon been making as much as their boss. San Francisco has a policy that supervisors should make at least 5% more than the people working under them.

Whatever the case, after about a half hour of debate, the commission voted 3-1 to up the pay.

“We need to pay city servants a wage so that they can live and raise a family here,” Crowley said. “If we want professionals making decisions, we need to pay them a professional wage.”

You be the judge of that.

What’s cooking: The San Francisco District Attorney’s Office begins its move later this month out of the aging and dilapidated Hall of Justice at 850 Bryant St. and into its new “temporary” digs a mile away on Rhode Island Street.

And like many civic building projects these days, the cost of the new digs has more than tripled between conception of the project and its completion.

The new offices are located in what was once a commercial catering operation, complete with an industrial-size kitchen. But since legal briefs don’t bake in ovens, the kitchen had to be pulled out at a cost higher than expected.

Add in other changes to accommodate the 300-plus prosecutors, investigators and other staff, and the city’s costs for the space wound up at over $8 million, four times the original $2.1 million estimate.

And that’s after the landlord agreed to pick up part of the costs.

The remodel took about a year, while the city was paying $4 million in rent, so the costs came to $12 million before the first box of files was moved.

“The longer it takes, the more it costs. We just have to get people out of the Hall of Justice before the next quake,” city administrator spokesman Bill Barnes said.

The lease on the new “temporary offices” is expected to run for 10 to 15 years while the city decides how and when to replace the Hall of Justice, which is neither seismically safe nor healthy, as sewage from the upstairs jail routinely seeps down into the D.A.’s offices.

Whatever the costs, the 300-plus staffers are ready to move.

“We are looking forward to moving into a seismically safe and sewage-free work place,” D.A. spokesman Alex Bastian said.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Phillip Matier appears Sundays and Wednesdays. Matier can be seen on the KPIX-TV morning and evening news. He can also be heard on KCBS radio Monday through Friday at 7:50 a.m. and 5:50 p.m. Got a tip? Call 415-777-8815, or email pmatier@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @philmatier