A six-figure salary for the mayor and rules for overriding mayoral vetoes got preliminary approval in a Monday session of planners trying to conceive a new Evansville-Vanderburgh County government.
Nothing was formally recommended in a busy, sometimes noisy meeting of the City-County Reorganization Committee's subcommittee on governance at Central Library.
Most of the ideas kicked around were left hanging for the subcommittee's next meeting Thursday.
But having already recommended a form of government headed by a mayor and a combined city-county council, the group applied itself Monday to fleshing out the details.
Subcommittee members agreed to recommend the mayor of a consolidated government be paid the rough equivalent of Mayor Jonathan Weinzapfel's $94,735 salary plus the nearly $31,998 earned by a county commissioner.
"I don't think that $125,000 is an overpayment for a chief executive of a city/county form of government of this size," said subcommittee member Chuck Whobrey, president and business manager of Teamsters Local 215.
The subcommittee — John Bittner, Susan Helfrich, Whobrey and James Harris, joined by reorganization committee members Rebecca Kasha, Matt Theby and Ed Hafer Jr. — also decided to recommend that two-thirds of the 11-member council be empowered to override the mayor's vetoes. That would be eight members.
But Sheriff Eric Williams, who sat in on the subcommittee's meeting, objected to a proposal to grant the mayor line-item veto power over budgets approved by the governing body. Such power would enable the mayor to strike some items from budgets.
Williams said he doesn't take issue with allowing a management professional working as the mayor's deputy to trim department heads' budget requests into a proposed budget for the governing body's consideration. That idea is supported by most subcommittee members.
But the sheriff said he should be able to speak in defense of any item in his budget that the mayor vetoes, and the governing body should be able to restore the funding if it votes with a two-thirds majority.
Whobrey decried what he called county government's lack of budgetary focus, which he attributed to the absence of a single chief executive in charge.
"Everybody proposes whatever they want to propose because they're all acting as free agents," he said. "... I think it's a better system that you get your one shot (to get a given item into a proposed budget). And I'm sympathetic to the thing of being shut out."
Also unresolved was the question of whether the consolidated government's governing body could vote with two-thirds majorities to add line items to a department's budget if department heads had not requested them. Williams objected to that, as well, arguing that such power usurps the authority of heads of county agencies.
Subcommittee members did agree that two-thirds of the governing body could add money to budget line items as they are presented by the mayor's management professional.
Governance subcommittee members said after Monday's session that any unresolved issues that are decided Thursday will be incorporated into their final recommendation to the full reorganization committee.