By Richard Chang, Sacramento Bee

Voters in fiscally conservative Placer County last week overwhelmingly approved an initiative that will more than double county supervisor salaries, a reversal of two previous elections in which they handily rejected modest raises.

While supporters praised the result as a fair compensation boost, opponents said voters mistakenly believed they were installing another pay restriction.

“It used words like ‘limit’ and ‘restrict,’” said Tom Hudson, a Roseville activist and executive director of the California Taxpayer Protection Committee. “Based on that, a person who wasn’t familiar with the county charter would get the impression this was putting limits. They wouldn’t have realized this was a 139 percent increase.”

Supervisor pay had been capped at $30,000 annually after voters approved a 1992 initiative sponsored by a local taxpayers group. Placer County voters had twice turned down proposals to increase that amount, first in 1998 for $35,000 annually and again in 2008 for $48,000 a year. Nearly 75 percent of voters rejected the 2008 proposal, according to the Placer County Office of Elections.

But last week, Measure B won with more than 62 percent of the vote.

Read the whole story