County staff brought the raise proposal to the board in November, at which point they were directed to bring back an ordinance no later than Jan. 23 for increasing board pay.
However, staff returned a month ahead of that date, bringing the ordinance for its first vote on Dec. 20.
Voting 4-1, with Supervisor Bruno Sabatier casting the only no vote, the board approved the first reading of an ordinance amending Section 2-3A.1 of Article I, Chapter 2 of the Lake County Code, that raises the supervisors’ pay rate by 40%.
The second reading took place at the board’s first meeting of the year on Jan. 10. That vote also was 4-1, with Sabatier again voting no, following the item’s introduction and no public comment.
The new pay rate will be set at 38.6% of the salaries of Superior Court judges — which now total $231,174 — with the chair to receive an additional 5%.
The board’s base salary will now rise from $63,714 to $89,233.16 annually, a 40% increase.
Unlike most county ordinances, which go into effect after 30 days, this ordinance — because it involves supervisorial pay — won’t become effective until 60 days after passage, or around March 10.
It could still be challenged by a referendum, which under state law would require the submission of qualified signatures totaling 10% of the entire votes cast in Lake County for all candidates in the last gubernatorial election in November, which totaled 20,131 votes. So 2,013 verified signatures would be required for a referendum effort to succeed.
Previous major board raise encountered opposition
The last time the Board of Supervisors tried to give its members a raise of that magnitude — which occurred more than 20 years ago — a referendum stopped the effort, and nearly a year and a half passed as the board and community worked to find an acceptable solution.
In September of 1999, the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to move forward with a more than 40% raise. The board’s pay at that time was $28,903 and was slated to increase to $40,649 in January 2000.
The 1999 board — whose members then included Gary Lewis, Karan Mackey, Bill Merriman, Ed Robey and Jeff Smith — argued that their workload and job commitments more than justified the increase.
However, Patricia McIvor of Lakeport led a petition drive to stop the raises. At that time, about 1,900 valid signatures were needed — a number not far off from what would be needed in a similar effort today.
Altogether, McIvor and the group opposed to the raises gathered more than 5,000 signatures — twice the number then-Registrar of Voters Diane Fridley had recommended they gather.
Pat McIvor died in 2014. Her daughter, Cathy McIvor, shared with Lake County News this week her memories of her mother’s determined effort to challenge the board’s action.
“She was just fired up about that,” she said of her mother’s reaction to the raise proposal.
Cathy McIvor said her mother spent months gathering the signatures. “I wasn’t able to talk to her for at least three or four months.”
Pat McIvor had her card table in the back of her Toyota pickup and she went all over the county, gathering signatures, her daughter recalled.
“Boy did she give it to ‘em,” Cathy McIvor said, adding that her mother could really say “no.”
Pat McIvor’s relentless efforts led to the Board of Supervisors voting unanimously to rescind the raise in December 1999.
Alternatively, the board wanted to pursue a plan to give its members a 13.33% increase over three years, a proposal the referendum’s supporters also opposed.
In January 2000, the supervisors accepted another proposal, which the board later changed to a 13.33% raise in the first year, with the board salaries later to be set at 60% of salaries of elected department heads.
That proposal later gave way to a third one in which they raised their pay to $32,756, and then asked then-Supervisor Robey to study the matter.
The board later asked the grand jury in December 2000 to consider how supervisors’ salaries should be raised and make a formal recommendation.
In February 2001, the grand jury presented its report, which included a recommendation to set board salaries at 55% of all elected officials as of July 1 of that year, which set them at more than $37,811, increasing to 60% of elected officials’ salaries as of July 1, 2003.
Two weeks later, the board voted 3-2 to approve the grand jury’s recommendations. Opposing the increase were then-supervisors Anthony Farrington and Rob Brown, who had defeated Mackey’s planning commissioner Peggy McCloud — who ran to succeed Mackey, who was retiring — and Merriman, respectively, in elections the previous year that had seen the raises being a campaign issue.
The board’s salaries had remained at 60% of the elected officials’ pay until the county began to implement the classification and compensation study in 2020.In 2020 and 2021, the supervisor approved a total of $21 million in raises due to that study, as Lake County News has reported.
So far, while there has been talk in the community of a referendum effort, no one has come forward to lead it.
However, the raises may lead to sitting board members being challenged in upcoming elections, as was the case when Brown defeated Merriman and Farrington defeated McCloud.
Since McIvor’s successful challenge of the supervisorial raises, there have been other successful referendums but most have focused on marijuana rules.
The last successful referendum in the unincorporated county on any topic was in 2014, when enough signatures were gathered to challenge a marijuana cultivation ordinance passed by the Board of Supervisors.
An effort in the fall of 2020 to gather enough signatures to challenge a Public Health enforcement ordinance created due to COVID-19 came up short.
Editor’s note: Information about the 2000 election has been corrected.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.