Highly paid Hennepin County Board officials decide they need a huge raise. Wait, what?

It must be nice to give yourself a 49% raise, like the Hennepin County Board plans to do.

Everyone else in Hennepin County will pay for it, even though nobody else in Hennepin County will have any say in it.

Not, at least, until the four commissioners who raised the idea of mega-raises — board Chair Irene Fernando and Commissioners Debbie Goettel, Marion Greene and Angela Conley — are up for re-election, like Goettel is this year. Board seats are nonpartisan, which might make this the one issue that could unify the entire county in indignation.

A 49% raise? In this economy? Hennepin County commissioners already earn a sweet, sweet $122,225 a year. They are the highest-paid county commissioners in a state with 87 counties. But wouldn’t it be nicer to earn $182,141 a year instead? Four out of the seven commissioners think so!

The argument the commissioners made to themselves as they asked themselves for a raise was that times have been hard. They have had to forgo several raises in their six-figure salaries. If this keeps up, how will they recruit top executive talent to the County Board?

It could be argued that anyone who runs for public office to get rich might not understand the concept of public service. You’re supposed to serve your constituents, not serve as their CEO.

But no, the solution, apparently, is to pay each of the seven county commissioners a higher salary than the governor of Minnesota earns, or Minnesota’s U.S. senators or anyone who represents Minnesota in Congress.

Nor are these nice raises tethered to the salaries of the hard-working county employees who do the actual work of patching the potholes and reshelving the library books and providing the services their neighbors need. You don’t see the board offering a 49% pay raise to a filing clerk trying to feed a family on $32,000 a year.

These past few years have been hard on all of us. We’ve been locked down, laid off and sticker-shocked every time we tried to buy a carton of eggs or a tank of gas. George Floyd was killed. Minneapolis burned. Most of us went years without a raise of any kind and when they came, they were more in the 1% to 3% range, while inflation galloped along merrily at 8%.

But at least we were all in it together, or thought we were.

Maybe some of our elected officials are only in it for themselves.