Bellingham voters will face an unusual question on the November ballot: should the city's charter be amended to remove a provision that requires the mayor to always be the highest-paid employee in city government? The current language, written by city freeholders in 1972, has produced a mayor's salary that now exceeds that of the mayor of Seattle, and city leaders say the requirement is making it increasingly difficult to hire and pay top-tier staff.
How the Current Rule Works
The Bellingham City Charter, drafted by freeholders in 1972, specifies that the mayor's salary must never fall below that of the highest-paid city employee or official. On paper this sounds like a sensible guardrail, a way of ensuring that the city's chief executive is compensated appropriately relative to the people working under them. In practice, however, it has created a cascading upward ratchet that the charter's authors almost certainly did not anticipate.
When the city negotiates labor contracts that increase wages for frontline workers, those increases ripple upward through management layers. Supervisors and managers receive salary adjustments to maintain appropriate differentials with their subordinates. Each upward adjustment in management pay then bumps the floor for the mayor's salary, because the charter requires the mayor's compensation to stay at or above the top of the city pay scale. The mechanism repeats every time wages rise anywhere in the organization, and because wages have risen substantially across the board in recent years, the compounding effect has been significant.
Mayor Kim Lund currently earns just under 237,000 dollars per year, plus an additional 49,128 dollars in benefits, for a total compensation package exceeding 286,000 dollars annually. For context, the mayor of Seattle, overseeing a city of more than 750,000 people with a vastly larger municipal budget, staff, and range of responsibilities, earns around 230,000 dollars per year according to reporting in The Seattle Times. Bellingham's population is approximately 92,000. The comparison is not a critique of Mayor Lund personally; it is an illustration of how a structural feature of the charter has produced an outcome that bears no rational relationship to the scale of the position or to compensation in peer cities.
In September 2025, Lund chose not to take the standard three-percent cost-of-living increase for 2026, citing the city's budget challenges. That voluntary restraint reduced the immediate financial impact of the charter provision but did not change the underlying structural problem, which will reassert itself whenever future salary adjustments occur. A voluntary decision by one mayor cannot reliably constrain the mechanism over the long term.
The Problem for Hiring
City council member Lisa Anderson articulated the bind clearly during discussions about the proposed amendment. The requirement to keep the mayor's salary at the top of the pay scale means the city cannot offer higher compensation to specialized professionals, department directors, or technical experts whose skills command premium salaries in the private sector and in larger municipal governments, without simultaneously driving up the mayor's wages.
"It is increasingly very difficult to hire really high caliber people that our community deserves," Anderson said, describing the challenge of recruiting and paying staff members appropriate to their experience without further boosting the mayor's compensation to levels that strain the overall budget and draw public scrutiny.
City employee compensation has increased 42 percent since 2022, reaching 133 million dollars annually. Nearly 40 Bellingham city employees already earn more than 200,000 dollars per year. Each time a new employee crosses that threshold through normal labor negotiations or market-driven recruitment, the charter provision effectively resets the floor for the mayor's minimum salary upward. The problem does not stay static. It compounds over time as the city workforce grows and wages continue to rise, and it constrains the city's ability to compete for experienced professionals in fields like engineering, finance, information technology, and urban planning, where compensation in the private sector regularly exceeds what a charter-constrained city can offer without triggering further mayoral salary increases.
What the Charter Amendment Would Do
The proposed charter amendment, which voters will consider in November, would replace the automatic linkage between the mayor's salary and other city employees' pay with a system where the mayor's compensation is set by an independent commission. This is the same model the City of Bellingham already uses for city council member salaries. In 2021, the Bellingham City Council established a salary commission that reviews council member compensation independently of the broader city pay scale, and that model has functioned without significant controversy.
Under the proposed amendment, the independent commission would evaluate factors like comparable salaries in peer cities, the scope of the mayor's responsibilities, local economic conditions, and the city's overall fiscal health before recommending a salary. That salary would not automatically change every time a city worker's pay goes up. The commission would meet on a defined schedule and make deliberate, transparent recommendations rather than allowing the mayor's compensation to drift upward as an unintended byproduct of routine labor negotiations.
The commission model is common in Washington cities and is generally seen as a more rational and accountable approach to setting elected official compensation than automatic linkage mechanisms that can produce outcomes far removed from what any deliberate policy process would choose. It also provides a degree of political insulation for council members, who currently face the awkward position of voting on personnel decisions that indirectly affect the mayor's pay through the cascading salary adjustment mechanism.
What Happens Next
The charter amendment will appear on the November 4 general election ballot for Bellingham voters. A simple majority is required for passage. If approved, the independent commission model would take effect for future mayoral salary determinations. The current mayor's salary would not be immediately reduced; the commission would evaluate and set future adjustments going forward, providing continuity while breaking the structural mechanism that has driven compensation to its current level.
Voters who want to review the full text of the proposed amendment can access it through the City of Bellingham's official communications in the weeks before the November election. The auditor's office will include explanatory language in the voters' pamphlet mailed to all registered voters in advance of the election. For context on the broader budget pressures facing the city, including the salary trends that led to this proposal, the full compensation data is available through public records requests to the city.
This is one of several Bellingham governance questions on the November ballot, and it represents a rare opportunity for residents to directly shape how their city's founding document handles a structural problem that has been building for years. The 1972 charter served the city for more than five decades, but some of its provisions reflect assumptions about how city government works that no longer hold in a community of Bellingham's size and complexity. The salary commission amendment is a targeted fix for one of those outdated assumptions, and voters will have the final word on whether to make the change.
