But they are even more so when the city won’t itemize what those increases are for the public.

Council Member Debora Nelson brought up the issue at the Arlington City Council’s Dec. 8 workshop on the 2015 budget.

“Are you comfortable saying that the city’s needs are being met by this budget, with these salary increases included?” Nelson asked Community and Economic Development Director Paul Ellis.

Council Member Marily Oertle echoed Nelson’s concerns about the “significant pay increases to some positions.”

“We have excellent employees, but some of these salary increases are out of line with reality,” Oertle said. “I had to hear about the city administrator’s contract on the street. We’re not being given the data to compare ourselves to the rest of Western Washington.”

Mayor Barbara Tolbert noted that the city administrator’s salary is up for review every five years, and that the council sets that rate.

Oertle had supported bringing a tax increase to the voters, to help support essential services such as street maintenance. But she’s since found it difficult to answer citizens’ questions about salaries.

“I don’t know how to justify some of these high-level wages,” Oertle said. “For voters who agreed to that increase, it’s a hard pill to swallow.”

Council Members Chris Raezer and Jan Schuette said the salary increases are “not outside the ballpark” for a city with Arlington’s size and services, including its airport. They both presented those increases as a means of retaining experienced employees. Schuette added that a number of positions had seen their salaries frozen for years and praised firefighters for taking a cut in pay.

Despite repeated attempts by The Arlington Times to get the information, Ellis said he did not have itemized raises for each city official. Tolbert said the budget actually includes less in salary expenditures than the 2014 budget. Raezer wanted to know what the difference in full-time employees was between those two years.

In an email to The Arlington Times, Ellis said in 2014 Arlington had 128.9 employees citywide. In 2015 it will have 126.21, a reduction of 2.69 employees. Salaries totaled a little more than $11.1 million, compared with the proposed $10.951 million, a reduction of $169,048.

When Oertle cited the recent closures of local grocery stores as evidence that “we’re not doing too well,” Ellis countered that the city is steadily gaining businesses, albeit more in manufacturing.

“Retail has just barely come back, but around the airport is where we’re seeing the strongest growth,” Ellis said.

Tolbert concluded, “We’re not one-hundred percent healthy, but we’re getting there.”

Nelson brought up a number of questions that citizens had asked her, such as whether the city could fund more playground equipment, pothole repairs, and improvements to sidewalks and crosswalks.

Ellis said: “We did as much as we could to balance this budget, not only financially, but also in terms of city services. No one department makes Arlington what it is. We wanted to spread the wealth between areas including parks, streets and public safety, to take care of concerns that had gotten left behind.”

Oertle expressed her gratitude to community groups such as the Rotary for their contributions to the city’s parks facilities and playground equipment.

Ellis touted equipment replacement as one priority, given its “terrible condition,” and promised that parks improvements are on the way.

“When the economy went down, all we could do was put a band-aid on our facility repairs,” Ellis said. “But we’re putting capital away this year and moving in the right direction.”