Well, that shouldn’t be any surprise to anyone living in Denver over the last few years.  But usually they have the decency to pretend that it’s for someone else.  This time, the Denver City Council wants your money for themselves and the office some of them hope to occupy come May.

At last night’s City Council meeting, they voted themselves (10-3, the Denver Post article neglects to mention who the three were) a 6.6% pay raise, starting two years from now:

Denver is the only large city in Colorado that pays its council members a living wage — $78,173 a year, plus about $30,000 in benefits.

The raise would give the council members an annual salary of $83,332 by July 2014. The council president makes about $10,000 more.

The mayor’s salary will grow to $155,211 from its current $145,601. The salaries of both the clerk and recorder and the auditor would be $134,235, up from their current $125,924.

Right now, the seasonally unadjusted unemployment rate for Denver is 10.9%; a seasonal adjustment might bring that down to 10.4% or so.  This is the highest that it’s been going all the way back to 1994, when the CDLE numbers begin.

In addition, Denver is looking at a $100,000,000 budget gap this year, slated to get worse over the next decade.  To City Council chairman Chris Nevitt, this may only be “symbolic,” but it’s pretty clear what it’s symbolic of.