In September 1774, as the first Continental Congress met in Philadelphia, John Adams wrote home to Massachusetts to offer his wife Abigail some advice for the trials he knew were ahead.
“Frugality, my Dear, Frugality, Economy, Parsimony must be our Refuge,” Quincy’s most famous son wrote.
“Let us Eat Potatoes and drink Water. Let us wear Canvass, and undressed Sheepskins, rather than submit to the unrighteous, and ignominious Domination that is prepared for Us,” he continued.
It’s tough to know exactly what Adams, who now rests with his family not far from Quincy City Hall, would have made of the goings-on there earlier this week.
But one can venture a guess.
In case you missed it, Quincy City Council voted Tuesday to give long-serving Mayor Thomas Koch a $125,000 pay raise, boosting his salary from $159,000 to $285,000, and making him one of the best-paid mayors in the country, according to published reports.
In this city of about 101,000 people, where the median household income is $90,205, that’s not exactly canvas and undressed sheepskins.
And some Quincy residents, apparently channeling Adams’ passion for frugality, weren’t thrilled at all — even with Koch’s arguments that he deserved the overdue hike.
“As taxpayers, we’ve had it,” resident Kathy Thrun Nason told WBZ-TV in Boston.
While he wasn’t opposed to “the mayor making more money than $159,000,” resident John Fitzmaurice told the station he did have a problem with “this giant lump sum to bring him up to $285,000.”
Admittedly, it wasn’t as bad as the $298,000 to $370,000 that a city-hired consulting firm recommended Koch get paid.
But it’s still more than the take-home pay for Boston Mayor Michelle Wu ($207,000); New York City Mayor Eric Adams ($258,000) and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson ($221,000).
The hike also puts Koch in line with town and city managers, who often oversee far smaller communities, but who nonetheless earn well into the six figures, according to that consulting firm’s report.
But that doesn’t mean the optics of it aren’t totally awful.
“Normally, an electorate would look at this and say ‘You’re kidding,’” veteran political consultant Tony Cignoli told MassLive. “This is an exorbitant pay increase, it’s become national news — you have the mayor of Quincy getting paid more than the mayors of Boston and New York City. As a consultant, I’d have a field day with this.”
Koch, who’s been in office since 2008, is unlikely to pay a political price for the raise – but stranger things have been known to happen.
Still, it’s tough to explain away when lawmakers on Beacon Hill, led by Democratic House Speaker Ron Mariano, of Quincy, constantly tout their efforts to close the economic gaps for Bay State taxpayers.
On Wednesday, as the House prepared to take up a $6.2 billion bond bill aimed at easing the state’s crushing housing crisis, Mariano, D-3rd Norfolk, defended Koch’s record.
“If you’ve come into our downtown, he’s redesigned it; he’s recreated it and made it a vibrant transportation hub, which is on the Red Line and … the Commuter Rail line, with a lot of attractive buildings going up, and a lot of interest in people coming in to reside in that downtown,” Mariano said.
The chamber’s top Democrat, however, stayed studiously away from pronouncing any judgment on the equity of the pay hike.
“It’s not for me to determine what’s fair and equitable,” he said. “It’s the voters of the city of Quincy who will make that determination.”
For sure, Koch’s pay raise is an interesting test case for those who argue that, if we’re going to attract the best and brightest to public service, then we need to pay them that way.
You can count UMass Amherst political science professor Ray La Raja squarely in that camp. But even for him, this one might be a bridge too far.
“This salary seems like an outlier,” he said.
Canvas and undressed sheepskins, anyone?
