Austin City Council members may cut pay Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved Video

AUSTIN (KXAN) -- On Thursday, the newly elected city council will consider whether to cut their own pay. The decision will be one of the council's first acts as an elected body. The current process at city hall does not give the mayor or any of the council members the option to decrease their individual compensation set in the city's budget and then move those funds to other areas or into their office budgets. The resolution on Thursday's agenda would allow the city manager to change the most current office budgeting structure. Under it, council members could cut their salary and move that money around as they please.

Mayor Steve Adler and District One representative, Ora Houston co-sponsored the item. Mike Kanin, publisher of the Austin Monitor says this is a good move in terms of getting good, quality talent into city council offices. He also says it looks good for council members because they get to say they slashed their pay.

"This is an interesting twist. One of the things that one might hear from an aid prior to this council is that their salaries were somewhat trapped by those of the council members because, from what we heard, you can't really have a salary higher than your council member," said Kanin. "So a lot of these folks were not getting paid what they might be on the open market."

Kanin said council members get paid roughly $70,000 annually, which he claims is not very much money given the high stress and high intensity of the job. Not all council members are on board with the salary slash. Some argue this move adds political pressure to those who feel like they would need to take a lower salary but may be the sole providers for their families and can't afford to.

Austin City Council members also want to rework the way meetings are conducted and how business passes through the system. Thursday night, they will host a town hall meeting where Austinites can voice opinions and give feedback related to the idea of making meetings more efficient and "user-friendly."

Kanin says the council members and people in the community are going to have to find a balance because the new system could have some setbacks.

"What could happen is they might move to a subcommittee system of something like 13 subcommittees," he said. "That's a lot of subcommittees; it's a lot more meetings. Even if you're not having longer meetings, you're having a lot more of them."

The public input meeting starts at 5:30 p.m. Thursday at City Hall.

Council members will also look into legal issues for Austin Fire Department's hiring process. Last year, a judge gave the green light to a deal between city and federal government to hire new firefighters. It ended a period of more than a year, where the Austin Fire Department froze new hires as the U.S. Department of Justice investigated claims of discrimination. The city ended up settling out of court.