By summer, City Council members could go from volunteer status to fully compensated officials.

But first, they have to move forward with placing a charter amendment on the May 9 ballot — and voters have to say “yes.”

Paying council members has been discussed intermittently for years, as San Antonio’s elected leaders work full time representing the city, and they do it nearly for free. The mayor earns $4,040 annually while council members are capped at $1,040 a year.

By contrast, mayors in Austin and Dallas earn $81,344 and $80,000, respectively. Council members in those cities make $69,885 and $60,000 annually.

Councilman Rey Saldaña told his colleagues that the lack of compensation keeps many otherwise-qualified individuals from running for local office.

Paying council members — an issue that voters here turned down in 2004 — is a tricky proposition. The only way to provide salaries is through amending the city’s charter, a document that outlines how San Antonio government will function.

Amending the charter requires calling an amendment election and asking voters to weigh in on propositions. It’s a procedure that can be done no more than once every two years.

On Wednesday, the city’s Charter Review Commission recommended to the council that it ask voters in May to approve a charter amendment that would allow for council members to earn a salary.

Commission member Patricia Rodriguez said the panel recommended compensation based on the San Antonio’s median household income because it was transparent and readily available.

“There’s no way that the mayor or council can have any way to increase or decrease that number,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons why we like area median household income.”

The commission recommended that council members earn $45,722 annually — the median household income in San Antonio. The mayor’s proposed salary of $61,725 is the median household plus an additional 35 percent.

The total annual cost of paying council members would be about $519,000 — a drop in the bucket of the city’s billion-dollar general fund.

But adding the council item to the May ballot is potentially a political mine field.

When paying council members had resurfaced as a possible charter amendment, then-Mayor Julian Castro said in 2013 that he’d remove himself from the equation when asking voters to approve it. If the measure were approved, council members would begin earning a salary, but he wouldn’t have. Then, in early 2014, the matter was put to rest because the city had begun preparing for what officials then — and accurately — predicted would be protracted negotiations with the public-safety unions.

The charter commission told the council there’s no reason to delay paying council members, so if voters gave it the nod, salaries would kick in on July 1 and no one would be exempted from receiving a paycheck. Meanwhile, the city has yet to hammer out a new labor contract with the police union and the fire union has not even begun its negotiations.

Two of the main sticking points preventing a new agreement are over things that strike at the pocketbooks of uniform personnel — health care and wages.

So a yet-to-be appointed committee charged with selling the charter amendments in the public could be forced to reconcile a request to spend more money on elected officials while city officials continue to say there’s not enough money to maintain the status quo in the contracts for the city’s police officers and firefighters.

jbaugh@express-news.net

Twitter: @jbaugh