Raises are on the way for 20 of Marin County’s top managers on top of cost-of-living adjustments previously approved by the Board of Supervisors.

The raises will cost the county $80,000 during the remainder of the fiscal year, which ends June 2019, and $220,000 annually beginning in 2020 when all the raises have been phased in. That includes the increased cost of setting additional money aside for managers’ pensions.

Raises ranging in size from 1.2 percent for Assistant District Attorney Barry Borden to 5.3 percent for Assistant Director of Human Resources Lisa Baker become effective in January 2019.

The managers who will see their salaries increase the most are assistant county administrators Angela Nicholson and Dan Eilerman. Nicholson and Eilerman will receive a 5 percent raise effective in January, another 5 percent raise in July 2019 and another 5 percent raise in July 2020. They are both currently paid a base salary of $181,397 a year.

Their boss, County Administrator Matthew Hymel, will receive a 2 percent raise in January and another 3 percent raise in fiscal year 2019-20. Hymel currently is paid a base salary of $284,274.

County Counsel Brian Washington, the manager with the second-highest salary next to Hymel, will see his salary increase 4.6 percent in January to $257,622. Health and Human Services Director Grant Colfax, the manager with the third-highest salary, will see his salary go up 2.5 percent in January to $247,248.

These “equity” raises will come in addition to a 2.5 percent cost-of-living raise these managers received in the current fiscal year, and previously approved cost-of-living raises of 3 percent in fiscal 2019-20 and 2.5 percent in fiscal 2020-21. Those are the same raises that county managers granted to members of the Marin Association of Public Employees (MAPE), the county’s largest union, when they signed a new three-year contract in July.

Hymel told supervisors last week the equity raises for managers were proposed after surveying approximately 60 department head and assistant department head classifications in other counties.

“Like with the criteria for our union employees, we strive to keep pace with the salaries of comparable counties with similar positions and scope of responsibility,” Hymel said.

At the Dec. 3 meeting Rollie Katz, executive director of MAPE, requested that the supervisors delay approval of the raises.

“I would ask that you defer this a week,” Katz said, “and that you publish the salary survey information that you use so that other employees and the public can see what you did.

“When higher-paid people get salary increases, it always causes a very understandable reaction from people who make less money,” Katz said. “Our people would want to know if you’re using the same standards.”

Supervisor Katie Rice said she would be open to delaying the vote, but no other supervisor showed interest in discussing the matter further and the raises were approved unanimously without additional discussion.

Robert Fellner, executive director of Transparent California, which posts information on the compensation of California public employees on the internet, questions the use of salary surveys to justify raises.

“Wages should be set on market conditions and reflect whether the county is able to attract and retain talent,” Fellner wrote in an email.

“Governments deploy misleading salary surveys limited to only other government agencies, and whenever an agency is at or near the bottom half of agencies surveyed, cite this as proof for the need to raise pay,” Fellner continued. “This approach literally guarantees an upward cycle of rising pay, based solely on the banal observation that, by definition, half of the agencies surveyed must be below the so-called market midpoint.”

Mimi Willard, founder and president of the Coalition of Sensible Taxpayers, said, “Our elected public officials are always telling us that pensions are completely out of their control. Well, every time you do something like this it increases the pension burden.”

Additional pension costs will account for nearly $44,000 of the $220,000 in annual additional ongoing county costs that will result from the equity raises.

Responding to Fellner’s comments in an email, Hymel wrote, “We survey other public agencies of similar size and scope because those are the agencies that we are competing with for talent. During the last recession, our department heads and our assistant department heads went several years with no salary increases.”

Hymel said because the salary increases won’t average more than 3 percent annually they won’t add to the county’s unfunded pension liability. He said that is because the county’s pension board has already factored a 3 percent annual increase in employee costs into its projections.

Defenders of government spending note that corporations reward their top manager far more handsomely than the public sector. Jean-Jacques Bienaime, CEO of the San Rafael-based BioMarin pharmaceutical company, received a salary of $1.16 million in 2018, up 5 percent from the previous year, and in 2017 Bienaime received an additional cash incentive of approximately $1.73 million.