G. Harold Duffey hasn't run Brentwood since June 9, when the City Council put him on paid administrative leave amid a texting scandal carried over from his old job in Oakland. On Aug. 11, the same council raised his salary to $313,650 — not because anyone praised his work, but because his contract left them no choice.

The 3% bump is the product of a "compaction clause" Brentwood agreed to when it hired Duffey last October: his base pay must sit at least 5% above the highest-paid employee reporting to him. When new Police Chief Walter O'Grodnick started July 16 at $298,714.68, the gap shrank to 2%, and the clause automatically pulled Duffey up — even though he is neither working nor cleared. It is a case study in how a routine contract term can hand a public official a raise while the city that employs him refuses to say why he was sidelined in the first place.

Brentwood, a city of roughly 65,000 in far East Contra Costa County, has said almost nothing about why Duffey is on leave. The council voted 4-0 on June 9 to sideline him — Vice Mayor Pa'tanisha Pierson abstained without explanation — and Mayor Susannah Meyer framed the move as strictly a personnel matter bound by legal and due-process limits, stressing to residents that the leave settled nothing about the underlying questions. The Press quoted her account of the closed session; The Dissent relied on that reporting and on the city's own meeting records.

The timing told residents most of what the city would not. On May 12, Oakland released thousands of text messages as part of a public-records fight tied to the corruption probe of recalled Mayor Sheng Thao. Among them were exchanges between Duffey — then an Oakland assistant city administrator — and his boss, City Administrator Jestin Johnson, about female colleagues. Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee called the communications degrading and unprofessional. Johnson resigned May 17, as KTVU and others reported. Duffey had already left for the top job in Brentwood.

That backdrop turned the Aug. 11 pay item into something more pointed than a payroll formality. In its preview of the meeting, the East County outlet contracosta.news put the logic plainly: the raise would happen for a single reason — the city had named a police chief. The mechanism is blunt. Hire a well-paid subordinate, and the compaction clause ratchets the manager's salary back up to preserve the 5% cushion. Per the city's staff report, Duffey's base moves from $304,515 to $313,650 — a raise he collects while an acting manager, Terrance Davis, does the job.

The San Francisco Chronicle, which first reported the increase, quoted a council member who bristled at honoring the deal midstream — objecting that the city's obligations should not run in only one direction, and asking why the council was upholding a contract that benefits Duffey while his performance under that same contract sits under what the member assumed was an active investigation. The council approved the raise anyway, as the contract prescribes.

The discontent isn't only about Oakland. Brentwood inherited its own complaints: during public comment before the leave vote, city staff raised concerns about Duffey, including allegations of gender-based discrimination — a thread separate from the texts that made headlines. Residents had objected from the start, too. At the May 18 State of the City address, resident David Cruz told officials that Duffey, in his words, had no business being there and should not be part of the city, according to The Press.

The council knew the risks going in. It hired Duffey in a 5-0 vote last October, after a national search by the firm Peckham & McKenney that Meyer said included an extensive background check, and over objections raised at the time about reporting out of Oakland.

What Brentwood won't say is when — or whether — the investigation ends, and what becomes of the raise if it concludes against him. For now the arithmetic is settled and the accountability is not: a city manager who cannot enter City Hall is earning about $9,000 more a year than he was in the spring, because the contract that is supposedly under review kept its promise to him while the review of him drags on.