How a $2,500 annual bonus became a $40,000-a-year perk for Everett mayor

Councilors made clear they wanted to keep the salary up-to-date for whoever was elected without having to regularly approve controversial salary hikes. But the immediate beneficiary was Mayor Carlo DeMaria, who was first elected in 2007 and remains Everett’s leader today.

Last week, the current council president, Stephanie Martins, posted a clip from that nine-year-old meeting as evidence of the original intent of what they termed a “longevity bonus,” and how dramatically it had been distorted to benefit DeMaria, who in 2020 became Massachusetts’ highest-paid mayor, a distinction he still holds.

What DeMaria ended up receiving in bonuses was $40,000 extra per year, three years in a row, before councilors discovered the payments in 2021. The inflated bonuses were tucked in an obscure area of the budget for the human resources department, rather than in the “longevity” line item in the mayor’s section.

Now, with DeMaria anticipating a challenge as he seeks reelection to a seventh term in November, the disputed longevity bonuses have resurfaced as a potent political issue. A surprise report in February from state Inspector General Jeffrey S. Shapiro found DeMaria pocketed $180,000 more than the council intended, and further, concealed the largest payments. Shapiro asked the council to recover the money, setting up a standoff in a city where the legislative body has no such power.

DeMaria has refused to return the money, objected to the inspector general‘s findings, and noted the City Council publicly approved the bonuses.

“I have not done anything to violate the trust of Everett residents regarding the longevity payments I received,” DeMaria said in a statement. “Those who are calling for repayment want to convince residents that I have done something wrong and it’s more important that residents know the truth that I followed the language of the ordinance and did not violate their trust.”

The mayor asserts the final language of the ordinance was slightly altered and awarded him $40,000 a year, rather than the $2,500 its sponsor, Hanlon, discussed.

DeMaria was alone in that interpretation, the inspector general found. Nine of the 11 councilors who voted on the measure were interviewed and none believed they were approving $40,000 a year, Shapiro’s report stated.

The current council has voted to urge the mayor to return the money and requested help from four offices with jurisdiction over questions of ethics and public corruption: the Middlesex district attorney, the state Ethics Commission, the attorney general, and the US attorney. None would confirm whether it is investigating when contacted by the Globe. On Tuesday’s council agenda is a resolution formally asking the attorney general to launch a legal action to recover the money.

“We’re pursuing this,” said City Councilor Peter Pietrantonio. “We’re not letting up.”

But the council’s power is limited; it can cut line items but cannot unilaterally initiate spending priorities. Councilors even had to ask the mayor for $150,000 in city funds to audit his longevity bonuses and other reimbursements. The mayor last week rejected the council’s request for another $200,000 in additional funds for its investigation; the council is now threatening to slash his budget priorities unless he restores it.

A next potential step, councilors say, would be to sue the mayor to recoup the money. However, they don‘t have funds for a lawsuit that they acknowledge would likely cost far more than DeMaria’s oversized bonuses did.

“How much money do we need to spend to get him to return the people’s money?” said Martins, the council president.

DeMaria wields significant control over Everett’s finances and decision-making, but he no longer commands the influence over the City Council that he once did.

When the council approved the longevity bonus in 2016, said Pietrantonio, “he just thought he could get away with it. At that time, he owned the council.”

“No one was going to question him,” Pietrantonio added. “Two years ago, when I got in, the council flipped,” with five of 11 seats turning over. Nine councilors cast votes of no-confidence against DeMaria in March.

Bonuses, pay raises, and cost-of-living increases made DeMaria the highest-paid mayor in 2020, when he received $236,647, as the Globe previously reported. Even though he no longer receives the oversized longevity bonuses, DeMaria is still the highest-paid mayor in the state, with a salary of $225,000, a Globe review found. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, who leads a city 13 times larger, makes $207,000. And though Quincy Mayor Thomas P. Koch saw his $159,000 salary hiked to $285,000 last summer, he deferred the raise until January 2028. Quincy’s population is double that of Everett.

The 2016 ordinance called for Everett’s mayor to receive a longevity payment of $10,000 for every completed four-year term, as well as a one-time payment of $10,000 for each term already served. DeMaria was about to finish his fourth term. That made him eligible for $30,000 immediately after passage of the ordinance, and another $10,000 beginning in 2018 — for a total of $40,000 by that year, according to the inspector general’s report.

But the mayor began seeking elevated bonuses even before the ordinance was passed in September 2016, according to the inspector general. City department heads with more than a decade’s worth of service in Everett get longevity payments, and the mayor was requesting a recalculation of his own past bonuses.

“The mayor would like you to calculate the longevity that he should have received vs what he actually received,” Demas, the CFO, wrote to then-budget director Laureen Chapman in 2016. “If you would put a rush on that for him.”

Demas did not respond to a request for comment.

The mayor also wrote to the budget director requesting a quick payout of his past years’ bonuses, the inspector general found.

“Can you make sure I get this check today,” DeMaria wrote in August 2016, according to Shapiro’s report. “Have them put it on my chair, I will be in by noon.”

The sum he received included a $1,700 advance on a longevity bonus that was not due until January, the report found. Then in September 2016, while the council was still deliberating over his bonuses, he received $30,000 for his prior three terms. That payment was not authorized, the inspector general found, since the council had not yet passed the longevity ordinance. In January 2017, when the new ordinance should have taken effect, he received another $30,000, the report shows — seemingly a duplicate of the payment he had already accepted.

After DeMaria’s next term began, in 2018, his administration began calculating his bonus by multiplying the total number of times he’d been elected — four — by $10,000. The bonus was further inflated when it was applied annually, rather than every four years. At a later public meeting, Everett city solicitor Colleen Mejia explained that was done because, for other city employees, longevity bonuses are awarded annually.

The mayor’s $40,000 payouts in 2018, 2019, and 2020 were not discovered until 2021. The City Council reduced his longevity bonus to $1,700 a year in 2022, then later eliminated it entirely. But until Shapiro’s report, the council had not asked him to return bonuses already paid.

An earlier version of this story misstated the date of the Everett City Council’s upcoming meeting. The council is scheduled to meet Tuesday.

Stephanie Ebbert can be reached at [email protected].