MANKATO — City Manager Susan Arntz received a strong performance review from the Mankato City Council and an accompanying pay raise that pushes her salary to $218,000 — an amount that rises to nearly $229,000 when her car allowance and deferred compensation payments are included.
Arntz’s annual review was conducted May 5 during a council meeting that was closed to the public and the media. Mayor Najwa Massad and each of the six other council members independently evaluated Arntz, but the results reported by Council President Mike Laven Monday night were cumulative.
Arntz scored either “above average,” meaning she “generally exceeded performance standards,” or was rated “excellent,” meaning she “always exceeded performance standards,” across a range of categories. The areas that were assessed included relationships with council members, relationships with citizens, policy execution, professional skills, reporting, staffing, supervision, fiscal management and more.
“We are honored and privileged that you are part of our team,” Massad said.
The 3% pay hike approved Monday night was a cost-of-living adjustment that generally matches what other city employees received if they had a similar performance review, Laven said.
But Arntz was also granted a 3% increase on Jan. 1, so the total increase since her last performance review in May 2024 was $12,521 or 6.1%, year over year. Her salary has risen just over $48,000 in less than five years after being hired in the fall of 2020 to replace longtime City Manager Pat Hentges, who was earning $181,000 at the time of his retirement.
In addition to her salary, Arntz’s contract includes an annual $4,800 car allowance and a $6,000 contribution to a retirement account — extras that she negotiated into her original employment agreement and which have not increased since. That brings her overall compensation, not counting medical insurance and other benefits provided to all city employees, to $228,846.
The performance review came just days after Arntz was presented the Dr. Robert A. Barrett Award for Management Excellence at the annual conference of the Minnesota City/County Management Association. The award is the top honor for city and county administrators in Minnesota.
The performance review also came after some difficult revelations about city management in recent months.
In January, the council learned that unidentified city staff had been deeply discounting the charges assessed to developers when their construction projects obstruct Mankato streets and sidewalks. Instead of assessing fees as mandated by council policy, city staff cut the charges to developers by as much as $140,000 — apparently out of the belief that the fee levels were unreasonably high.
Arntz conceded that any discounts should have been authorized by the council, which ultimately voted to formalize the lower obstruction fees in city policy — just in time to reduce anticipated charges against the developers of a downtown hotel project by nearly $300,000.
In February, Arntz asked the council to authorize a $742,000 streetscape project for the just-completed Riverfront Drive reconstruction — much of the money to pull down highway-style light poles that had been installed just months earlier and replace them with vintage-style lights in the historic Old Town business district.
Decorative lighting had been suggested in the master plan for Old Town but the towering light poles had been installed instead. The financial impact of the mistake was reduced to roughly $200,000 because the highway style poles will be reused on a street-light replacement project on tap for this year farther north on Riverfront Drive.
And in April, Arntz reported that nearly $1 million of expenses were omitted from cost estimates provided to the council a year ago when it was deciding whether to go ahead with the Riverfront Drive reconstruction — which had been portrayed as a $9.1 million project. There were multiple mistakes made by the city’s engineering division in administering the project, the largest being the decision to place a purchase order for $940,000 in traffic signal systems and street lights without the knowledge or authorization of the council or city manager.
The purchase, along with being far above the threshold requiring council approval, was not included in the project budget presented to the council, the public and the Minnesota Department of Transportation.
Arntz’s forthright reporting of the problems surrounding the project was an example of why she received such high marks, Laven told The Free Press after Monday night’s meeting.
“She had the responsibility to say ‘This is what’s going on, it’s wrong and we’re going to fix it and put in procedures to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Laven said.