Explaining city council with salad dressing

Imagine you’re at one of Quincy’s many fine restaurants. You order a salad — and it arrives drowning in dressing. Sure, you wanted dressing. The salad needed it. But what landed on the table could more accurately be described as soup than salad.

You flag down the waiter and politely point out that the salad is now inedible. Instead of bringing you a fresh one with a reasonable amount of dressing, the waiter returns with a full bottle, sets it on the table, and says, “Next time you can add it yourself.” He looks at you like the problem is solved and walks away.

Now you’ve got a bowl of salad soup… with a side of more soup.

As ridiculous as that sounds, it’s essentially what the Quincy City Council did last week.

To anyone just skimming headlines, it might have sounded like the council was finally trying to fix the mess they made last year. To the casual observer, the move may have even seemed like a reasonable, measured step.

So what did they actually do?

Councilors voted to tie future raises for the mayor and themselves to the Boston-area Consumer Price Index — a system based on the local cost of goods. The next CPI-based raise won’t take effect until 2031 for the council and 2033 for the mayor. On paper, that kind of long-range planning may sound responsible.

But here’s the problem: the system doesn’t replace last year’s massive raises — it builds on top of them. Those inflated salaries remain locked in as the new baseline. This wasn’t a reset. It was reinforcement.

A real fix would have started by undoing last year’s raises and putting the new system in place beginning after the next election — giving voters a say before the pay.

Instead, this was an attempt to dress up excess in the language of reform. The goal wasn’t to restore public trust or repair the damage to the city’s budget. It was to quiet critics with a carefully packaged policy that sounds like accountability… but isn’t.