The Lynchburg City Council on Tuesday voted to take the first step toward conducting an audit of pay increases given to top city staff.
The review would examine every increase of $100 or more in salary and other payments for the staff members directly appointed by the council — the city manager, city attorney and clerk — along with other staff in the city manager’s office, department heads and other instances of structural pay adjustments made above general wage increases. The scope of the review would be from July 2021 forward.
The vote came after a month of public discussion, spurred in part by council member Marty Misjuns, who is running for reelection, at a city council candidate debate. He is calling the validity of recent pay raise processes into question.
Tuesday’s resolution does not launch the audit. It directs city staff to prepare a request for proposals from potential auditors and bring it back to the council for approval no later than its Dec. 8 meeting. The resolution also asks city staff to talk about how much the audit will cost and where that money could come from.
The auditor would be required to identify applicable legal requirements, sources of authorization and necessary votes and ordinances for each pay increase, according to the resolution. The examination would include a combination of compensation policies, employment agreements, budget actions and elements of the city charter and city code. The auditor would also be asked to deliver an “exception report” with the details of any pay increases determined to be noncompliant with those rules.
In a statement to Cardinal News, Deputy City Manager Greg Patrick said that staff will prepare the request for proposals as directed.
“City council discussions at recent meetings have conflated two distinct issues: council’s process for reviewing its appointees and providing compensation adjustments and the administrative management of personnel and compensation, which falls under the authority of the city manager,” the statement said.
City code “governs council’s authority to appropriate funding, including the annual budget and subsequent funding adjustments, not the approval of individual personnel or compensation decisions. Those decisions fall under the administrative authority of the city manager and his designees, consistent with the city charter and established employment policies,” the statement said.
The original resolution to start the audit process was presented by Misjuns at a city council work session on Oct. 13. There, Misjuns spoke about his concerns regarding the authorization process for pay raises for City Manager Wynter Benda between 2021 and 2024 and added that “we need to see how far this goes,” referencing other city staff. The presentation came after Misjuns drew attention to the pay raises at an Oct. 6 city council candidate debate.
As an example, when hired in 2021, Benda’s compensation was set at $215,000, with additional benefits, according to a contract obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. In 2024, an updated contract shows his salary at about $283,000, with additional benefits. The city manager is now being paid about $300,000 not including benefits such as a car allowance, according to a “media fact sheet” provided by Misjuns several months ago. The overall salary change includes a combination of individual raises and citywide cost-of-living wage increases.
Other Virginia city managers make salaries between $250,000 and $350,000, including those in midsize cities like Roanoke and Suffolk and larger cities like Virginia Beach, according to public salary data, which shows salaries, but not how they’ve increased over time.
The Lynchburg council’s resolution approved on Tuesday included amendments to Misjuns’ language from council member Chris Faraldi.
Faraldi said at the meeting that his amendments helped to “include the full picture” of elements that govern employee pay and remove language that established “a basis, a foundation, a place of guilty until proven innocent.”
Pay raises “are approved through the budget at bare minimum,” Faraldi said, referencing the public votes that the council takes to allocate money in the city’s budget. An audit is about getting to the bottom of the “difference of agreement about where that all happened, what it all looked like,” he said.
Misjuns said at the meeting that Faraldi’s new version “takes the operational teeth” out of his proposal. The adopted resolution does not include original language that directed a temporary freeze on pay rates along with a call for the city council to “decide, for each item, whether to ratify it, correct it, collect it, or take no action.”
The resolution passed with a 4-3 vote, with Faraldi, Misjuns, Stephanie Reed and Vice Mayor Curt Diemer in favor.
Council member Jacqueline Timmer said at the meeting that she is in favor of the audit but could not support the resolution with Faraldi’s amendments because it “removes the authority and the responsibility from council” that was originally included in Misjuns’ proposal. She and other council members also cited concerns with not having enough time to review the amendments, which were presented for the first time at Tuesday’s meeting.
At the Oct. 13 work session, council member Sterling Wilder, who was first elected to the city council in 2016, said the process for giving council-appointed staff members raises has been consistent for the decade that he’s served and has never been cause for concern before. He said it’s “questionable” that the audit discussion made it onto the agenda during an election season when at-large members Misjuns, Reed and Mayor Larry Taylor are up for reelection.
The path to the Dec. 8 meeting is still partially unclear, as the city council determines how legal counsel will be included in the discussion. City Attorney Matthew Freedman has recused himself from discussions of the audit because they concern his pay. At the Oct. 13 work session, the city council adopted a special rule to ensure an outside attorney is present to fill his spot. The process to identify such outside counsel has not yet been determined, and the validity of the special rule itself has been questioned by some members of the city council.
Approving the resolution now “gives us time, before December, to get a proper outside counsel to advise us if what we passed is up to muster, and then if it wasn’t, amend it,” Faraldi said at Tuesday’s meeting.
