Mayor-elect in Apopka backtracks on salary
He’ll take full $150K pay, donate half to city
Chopping the Apopka mayor’s $150,000 salary in half was a key plank in Bryan Nelson’s successful campaign for the city’s top post.
During a Jan. 31 forum he pledged, “The first thing is, I will take a 50 percent pay cut — a 50 percent pay cut — because that’s what the city needs.” He repeated the vow in an election mailer and in an interview with the Orlando Sentinel.
But after walloping incumbent Mayor Joe Kilsheimer in the March 13 election, Nelson told the Sentinel he plans to accept the full $150,000 salary and then return half to the city, rather than formally cutting the mayor’s pay to $75,000. Asked this week why he wouldn’t ask City Council to simply reduce the mayor’s pay to $75,000, Nelson said his accountant advised him he could “just donate it back” to the city.
The strategy could double his city pension if he serves five years or longer as mayor of Orange County’s second-largest city. According to city pension rules, an employee’s pension is calculated using the five best-earning years of the last 10 years of service. If Nelson, 59, were to serve two terms, or eight years,
he would be eligible for an annual pension of $33,000, based on a $150,000 salary. It would be $16,500 based on a $75,000 salary.
Dominic Calabro, president and CEO of Florida TaxWatch, a research group and government watchdog, questioned the honesty of Nelson’s proposed plan.
“The bottom line is if you want to really honor what you say, then you cut the salary from $150,000 to $75,000 and you get your [pension] benefit based on the $75,000. That’s it. That’s the honest and forthright way to do it. Period. End of discussion,” Calabro said Wednesday. “Anything short of that is, at best, circuitous and, at worst, gamesmanship.”
Calabro said he was familiar with Nelson from the new mayor’s tenure in the Legislature from 2006 to 2014 and described him as “a good guy.”
“We have these situations a lot,” Calabro said. “He has to pay taxes on the whole $150,000 even if he donates $75,000 of it. You look at the Internal Revenue Code, that’s the way it works. … The most compelling benefit to him would be the public pension, which dramatically rises by doubling the salary.”
Nelson cited President Donald Trump, who made a campaign promise to refuse the presidential salary of $400,000.
“I think that’s what Trump’s doing,” Nelson said. “He gives it all back to the Treasury.”
Since taking office, Trump has donated his pay, which is issued in quarterly installments, after taxes are deducted, to different federal agencies.
Nelson, who also would be eligible for a state pension from his service as a lawmaker and commissioner, would not rule out a council vote to reduce the mayor’s salary.
“Anything is possible,” he said. “We’ll figure it out.”
He added, “All I’m committed to is at the end of every month, the money I get will be half what Joe got.”
Nelson made Kilsheimer’s salary one of his main campaign issues, along with getting rid of red-light cameras.
He pointed out that Kilsheimer, a former Orlando Sentinel reporter who led a communications company before his 2014 election, cast the deciding vote in a 3-2 council decision to raise the mayor’s annual salary to $150,000. At the time, the city budget included only $13,500, the cost of predecessor John Land’s health insurance, for the mayor.
Nelson, who currently earns $81,177 a year as an Orange County commissioner — a post defined as “parttime” — had hoped to plow the other half of the mayor’s pay into the city’s financial reserves, which he said need beefing up. He won 63.4 percent of the ballots cast in the mayor’s race to Kilsheimer’s 36.6 percent.
The owner of an insurance agency on North Park Avenue, Nelson, whose family made their living growing roses in Orange County, will turn the reins of the insurance business over to his daughter while he is mayor.
“She’s more credentialed than I am,” he said.
The mayor’s pay has long been something to talk about in Apopka.
Land, who served as mayor for all but three years from 1950 to 2014, when Kilsheimer defeated him, earned $1 his first month in office.
But his salary grew during the years to $157,000 — making him at one time the highest-paid elected official in Central Florida, earning more than the mayor of Orlando. His salary was even higher than then-Gov. Jeb Bush’s.
Land stopped drawing his $3,200 weekly mayoral check in 2007, with the city paying only his health-care premiums.
By then, he was receiving monthly pension payments of $6,141.54, which continued until his death in 2014 at age 94.