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By James Phillips

The Demopolis City Council voted Thursday to increase the salary of the mayor and council after municipal elections later this year.

The amounts approved Thursday will see council members pay raised from $300 to $500 per month, while the mayor’s pay will go up from $30,000 to $40,000 per year. That brings the council members’ salaries to $6,000 each.

“With this being an election year, it is a good time to go ahead and address this,” Mayor Woody Collins said in a phone interview on Monday. “When I was first elected to the council 25 years ago, the salary was the same as it is now. I’m not sure how long these amounts have been in place.”

Collins said a current mayor and council cannot vote themselves a raise, meaning this approval would not take effect until municipal elections are held in August. He added the change must be approved six months before the election, making Feb. 26 the cutoff date.

In other action from the meeting, the council approved $10,000 in funding for the newly reformed Demopolis Historic Preservation Commission.

“That is funding the commission has always had, but it had ceased to exist around the time COVID started,” Collins said. “We named the new members at our last meeting, and they want to have some training and things like that. That is what those funds have always been used for in the past.”