The mayor of New York, America’s largest and most expensive city to run, earns about $225,000 a year to serve as the municipal government’s top administrative officer. A proposal to give Miami-Dade’s mayor a raise would have Carlos Gimenez earning up to $324,000 a year, nearly 50 percent more than Bill de Blasio makes running NYC.
In fact, a proposal narrowly approved by a county committee this week and endorsed through a spokesman for Gimenez could make Miami-Dade’s chief executive one of the highest paid big-city mayors in the country. Research by Gimenez’s office and a 2017 survey by the American City Business Journals found that San Francisco’s mayor, the late Edwin Lee, earned the most of the nation’s large-city mayors. The Miami-Dade survey said Lee earned $365,200 in salary and fringe benefits.
On Tuesday, a committee of the Miami-Dade County Commission endorsed Gimenez’s earning the $324,000 that his predecessor, Carlos Alvarez, made in salary and benefits before being tossed from office in a 2011 recall. Gimenez promised to cut his salary when he first ran for mayor that year, and has voluntarily declined all but $150,000 of the post’s compensation.
Read more at our news partner, the Miami Herald.