Photo: Ann Sullivan-Larson / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
The Wright County Board of Supervisors voted in March 2022 to accept the county compensation board’s raises for elected officials: 4 percent for supervisors, 22.5 percent for the auditor, county attorney, treasurer and recorder, and 36 percent for the sheriff.
Before the vote, Belmond council member and former mayor Al Mattison spoke during open forum. He said Belmond’s police were citing the state’s “Back the Blue” law and the county’s raises in asking for big raises of their own, which had created a budget problem for the city.
Mattison said he had asked legislators Guth and Baxter at a town hall what they meant by the law, and they said raises were supposed to be phased in over three to five years. Supervisor Karl Helgevold said the law didn’t actually set a timeframe.
Mattison said these were the biggest raises he had seen in years of budgeting and they would never survive arbitration.
Jill Ostrander writes for Clarion News Online.