An accounting mix-up puts Seaside councilmembers on the hook.

When was the last time you got a raise at your job?

Sloan Campi here, asking that question seriously and preparing to hit you with some financial math.

If you’ve gotten a raise in the past year or so, it was probably based on your previous year’s salary. And if that isn’t the first raise you’ve received, it was likely that any other raises were based on the salary before that. For example, if you were making $100,000 per year then received a 3-percent raise, it means you made $103,000 the next year, and then if you received another 3-percent raise the following year, it means your salary went up to $106,090. The extra $90 is a result of compounding.

This is pretty standard practice across salary-based jobs. But it was this assumption that led the City of Seaside to make an egregious mistake in calculating city councilmember pay raises after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 329 into law in 2023. 

In this week’s edition of the Weekly, Staff Writer Aric Sleeper tells the story of how it happened. The backlash of the miscalculation was an ugly accounting faux pas that puts councilmembers in a bind to pay back $26,000 of salary they already collected. 

SB 329’s language is pretty simple: A councilmember’s salary raise must not exceed 5 percent for each calendar year from the operative date of the last adjustment. The key term here though is that last part: “from the operative date of the last adjustment.”

The Office of the California Attorney General clarified this rule in 2006, stating: “the 5 percent salary increase authorized for city council members of a general law city is to be applied to the currently received salary amount for the total number of years since the last salary adjustment.” 

This was rough news for Seaside, because the last time councilmembers got a pay raise was in 1986—just shy of half a century ago. Until their vote in 2025 to give themselves a raise, councilmember salaries were stagnant at $400 per month—not a very attractive salary for anyone to consider taking on a leadership position.

Compounding interest versus simple interest is a basic financial literacy concept that everyone should understand—including councilmembers. In this case, it’s unfortunate that Seaside’s leadership didn’t take a look at the fine print on how the Attorney General interpreted laws like this, stating specifically that their salary increases cannot be compounded. 

Regardless of where your politics stand, the point of increasing the salary of councilmembers is to attract good leadership—after all, any good leader should know the value of their time spent leading. My hope is that it serves as a lesson for Seaside city staff and councilmembers: Pay attention, both to the fine print in laws, and to the economic times we live in.