Pay Raises for Council, Mayor Proposed : City Hall: The plan offered by Ferraro requires approval by voters. Officials step up debate over ethics package.

The Los Angeles City Council continued to chip away at a broad ethics-in-government package Thursday as a new proposal emerged calling for huge pay raises for the council, the mayor and the city attorney.

The proposed pay raise was introduced, quietly, by Council President John Ferraro amid a flurry of amendments to the ethics package advocated by Mayor Tom Bradley’s ethics commission.

“I do this as president of the City Council,” Ferraro said in an interview. “These are my constituents. I have to take the heat on this. I felt as president I should do it.”

Ferraro said he is “not really too optimistic” that voters will approve the ballot measure required to enact the pay hike.

The proposal would give the council’s 15 members a $24,635 pay raise, increasing their annual salary to $86,157--the amount paid to Municipal Court judges.

Under the plan, the mayor’s salary would jump to $143,595 from its current $102,537, and the city attorney’s pay would jump to $123,081 from $87,156, with future increases tied to the percentage increase of municipal judges’ pay.

“It would take the salary-setting mechanism out of politics,” Ferraro said.

The pay hike proposal would be placed on the June ballot as a measure separate from the ethics reform package now under consideration by the council, he said.

As the second daylong session on ethics ended, council members had yet to deal with the pay hike issue, or another highly controversial proposal to establish public financing of local political campaigns.

Instead, the council tinkered with some provisions of the ethics package and restored the right of city officials to accept gifts--such as ballpoint pens, candy, calendars and mementos.

The council changed a provision calling for quarterly filing of financial disclosure statements, voting to make the disclosure only twice a year.

Another change made Thursday would require that the sponsors of recall drives submit financial disclosure statements. The council approved the measure at the request of Councilman Hal Bernson, who was the target of a failed recall effort last fall.

And in a change of legal language that reflected the council’s dislike for the overall package, the lawmakers voted to remove a clause that would allow courts to “liberally construe” the hundreds of specific requirements of the package.

The council also voted to give itself more authority over the many independent and partially independent commissions that handle much of the city’s business--including the Department of Water and Power, the Department of Airports and the Harbor Department.

Geoffrey Cowan, the chairman of the mayor’s ethics commission and one of the authors of the ethics proposal, said Thursday that because of the amendments added over the last two days by the council, “the law is neither as clear nor as effective as the one that was proposed.”

He said he is not sure whether the changes are so fundamental that he and other members of the commission will call for a citizens’ initiative to rectify the problems.

The council will continue its debate today.