America’s Highest-Paid City Council Just Voted 12–0
To Ask Voters for a One-Day Workweek.
On June 30, 2026, the Los Angeles City Council voted 12–0 to put a charter amendment on the November 3 ballot that would cut its own required meeting schedule from three days a week to one. Two members were absent. A third, Monica Rodriguez (D), walked off the floor rather than cast a vote she called “tone deaf.”
The council asking for the lighter calendar is the highest-paid big-city council in the United States. The city charter ties member salaries to Superior Court judges, which currently works out to a $245,255 base — up to $270,389 with premium pay, per the Controller’s own dataset — more than a member of Congress makes, for representing about 258,000 constituents each.
The vote might read as routine calendar housekeeping — except for what happened in the same June 30 session. The council pulled its noncitizen-voting measure and its LAPD-oversight measure off the same ballot “for more vetting,” after shelving council expansion, ranked-choice voting, and ethics reform to 2028. Out of an entire charter-reform package, the one measure that survived to the November ballot was the one lightening the council’s own schedule.
- $245,255 — base salary of an LA councilmember — up to $270,389 with premium pay — the highest of any big-city council in America · Source: LA Controller pay-rate data
- 12–0 — the June 30 vote to place the meeting cut on the November 3 ballot; two members absent, Monica Rodriguez (D) walked out in protest · Source: NY Post via Yahoo News; LA City Clerk session video
- 3 days → 1 — what the charter amendment would do to the council's required weekly meeting minimum · Source: LA City Council Rules; NY Post via Yahoo News
- ~258,000 — residents represented per LA councilmember — versus roughly 162,000 in New York and 54,000 in Chicago · Source: U.S. Census figures against council sizes
- 2028 — the year council expansion, ranked-choice voting, and ethics reform were shelved to — while the schedule cut advanced to this November · Source: MyNewsLA; CityWatch LA
Under the council’s own published rules, regular meetings happen Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday at 10 a.m. — the three-day floor set at the charter level, which is why changing it requires a ballot measure at all. The amendment approved June 30 would drop that minimum to a single day a week and let the council decide the rest of its calendar for itself. Because it changes the charter, the council cannot enact it alone; Los Angeles voters will decide on November 3.
The idea has a paper trail. It grew out of Council File 23-1027, the charter-reform file opened in September 2023, and a June 2024 amending motion by Katy Yaroslavsky (D) and Tim McOsker (D) that the council adopted 15–0. Eunisses Hernandez (D), a Democratic Socialists of America-backed member, had floated the one-day model in early 2024, pointing to the LA County Board of Supervisors, which meets weekly. Rodriguez was the lone voice of protest in the chamber on June 30 — and rather than dignify the item with a no vote, she left.
“The idea that members of this council would ask the public to grant them less days of showing up for work for council meetings is tone deaf.”
Monica Rodriguez (D), LA City Councilmember, District 7
The pay is not an accusation; it is a formula. Charter §218 pegs councilmember salaries to those of Superior Court judges, with the Controller earning 10 percent more than a councilmember, the City Attorney 20 percent more, and the Mayor 30 percent more. Judicial raises flow through automatically — no council vote, no public hearing, no headline. The current result, per the Controller’s open-data portal: a $245,255 base, rising to $270,389 with premium pay.
Public salary records put that figure in context. New York City councilmembers earn $148,500. Chicago aldermen earn roughly $115,000 to $142,000, per the city’s own open-data portal. Houston councilmembers make $62,983; Phoenix’s make $64,889. A member of Congress earns $174,000. Los Angeles pays nearly $100,000 above New York — and unlike New York’s 51-member council or Chicago’s 50-seat body, LA spreads its roughly 3.9 million residents across just 15 districts, about 258,000 constituents per member. Each member also commands a multimillion-dollar office budget and staff.
City Controller Kenneth Mejia (D) made the comparison himself back in December 2022, in a post that went viral precisely because most Angelenos had no idea what their council cost. The figures in that post are now dated — the judge-tied formula has pushed salaries higher since — but the ranking it documented has not changed: no big-city council in America out-earns this one.
LA City Councilmembers are the highest-paid city councilmembers of any major city in the nation — a salary comparison across the largest U.S. cities. (Posted December 2022; council salaries have risen since under the charter's judge-tied formula.)
What makes June 30 a story is not one vote — it is the ledger of the whole session. The council had spent two years assembling a charter-reform package: expanding the council from 15 seats to 25, ranked-choice voting, an independent ethics overhaul, a measure extending voting rights to noncitizen residents, and new civilian oversight of the LAPD. By the time the session gaveled out, the expansion, ranked-choice, and ethics measures had been shelved to 2028, and the noncitizen-voting and police-oversight measures — both already approved for the ballot in mid-June — were pulled back at the last minute “for more vetting.”
The vetting standard, it turns out, is selective. Every measure that would have checked, diluted, or scrutinized the council’s own power needed more time. The measure lightening the council’s own workweek was ready to go. Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson (D) has noted the city last reformed its charter in 1999 — which makes the sole surviving amendment of a generational reform effort a schedule cut for the people who wrote it.
KEPT — on the Nov. 3 ballot: the charter amendment cutting the council’s required meetings from three days a week to one. Passed 12–0.
PULLED “for more vetting”: noncitizen voting rights (approved 10–5 just two weeks earlier) and expanded civilian oversight of the LAPD.
SHELVED to 2028: council expansion from 15 to 25 seats, ranked-choice voting, and independent ethics reform.
Net result: every reform that would check the council’s power waits years. The one reform easing the council’s obligations goes to voters in four months.
“What the people want are elected officials who want to do their work, especially when they're getting paid a quarter of a million dollars and they have a $2 million staff. Anyone who finds the meetings inconvenient should perhaps think about other employment opportunities.”
Monica Rodriguez (D), LA City Councilmember, District 7
The case for fewer meetings would land differently in a city that was humming. This one is not. The 2026 homeless count — conducted at the start of the year — remains unreleased roughly six months later, tangled in a data fight with HUD that has landed in front of federal Judge David Carter, with a hearing set for August 6. The last finalized numbers, from 2025, counted 72,308 homeless people county-wide and 43,699 inside the city. Eighteen months after the Palisades fire killed 12 people and destroyed roughly 6,800 structures, recovery is still grinding. And the council’s homelessness committee, chaired by Nithya Raman (D) — a DSA-backed member now in a November runoff against Mayor Karen Bass (D) — canceled four of its eight scheduled meetings after she launched her mayoral bid, at one point going five straight weeks without convening.
The money is no healthier than the streets. Controller Mejia sounded a “GOING BROKE ALERT” in October 2024 when the city blew through its entire $87 million annual liability-claims budget in the first three months of the fiscal year, spending $97 million. The following spring brought a roughly $1 billion shortfall and 1,647 proposed layoffs — averted only through labor negotiations. The FY 2026-27 budget, passed 12–1 on May 22 with Traci Park (D) dissenting, had to close another gap in the hundreds of millions inside a roughly $15 billion plan. And one of the twelve members voting to lighten the schedule, Curren Price (D), is awaiting trial on a 12-count felony public-corruption case — he is presumed innocent, and his case is noted here only because he remains a voting member of the body asking for the lighter calendar.
GOING BROKE ALERT: the City of LA has already spent $97 million on liability claims in the first three months of the fiscal year — blowing past the $87 million budgeted for the entire year.
WHERE ARE OUR TAX DOLLARS GOING? The Controller's office breaks down where Angelenos' money is actually being spent as liability payouts and budget pressures mount.
LA City Hall’s condition has become a national cable-news staple — the segments below tackle Mayor Bass and city governance broadly rather than this ballot measure specifically, and are labeled as such.
Fairness requires the proposers’ argument in full. Yaroslavsky and McOsker say the change “modernizes” a schedule that predates modern committee structures: most real legislative work happens in committees, which would continue meeting; fewer full-council days would mean longer, better-prepared agendas rather than fewer actions; and freed-up days could go to district work and evening sessions residents can actually attend. McOsker’s spokeswoman, Sophie Gilchrist, put the pledge on the record: “longer Council agendas, not fewer Council actions.” Hernandez points to the five-member LA County Board of Supervisors — which governs nearly 10 million people while meeting weekly — as proof the model works.
“I'm working all the time. I'm either working here, I'm working in my district, I'm doing dishes and vacuuming at home, and all I want to do is be more efficient in this space.”
Katy Yaroslavsky (D), LA City Councilmember, District 5 — co-author of the proposal
The counterargument does not require doubting anyone’s work ethic. Full council meetings are where California’s Brown Act guarantees public comment, where every member goes on the record, and where the cameras run. Cut the charter minimum from three days to one and the city loses up to two-thirds of its guaranteed public-comment venues and recorded floor votes — a structural change that outlives every current member, whatever their intentions. That is the point CityWatch pressed a week after the vote.
“Public meetings are not an interruption of governing. They are governing.”
CityWatch LA, July 6, 2026
The nation’s highest-paid city council — $245,255 base, $270,389 with premium, roughly 258,000 constituents per member — voted 12–0 to ask voters for a one-day required workweek, in the same session it pulled or shelved every charter reform that would have checked its own power. The homeless count is unreleased, the Palisades are half-rebuilt, the liability budget detonated in a quarter, a member awaits a felony corruption trial with the presumption of innocence, and the one reform that sailed through was the council’s own calendar. On November 3, Los Angeles voters get the only recorded vote that counts.
