New councillors to decide on pay soon
Report on options goes to council in January
City councillors are not organizing quietly to vote themselves a pay raise, one councillor said on Thursday.
“He’s fishing — there’s nothing,” said Coun. Stephen Wright, referring to columnist David Goyette’s piece on Thursday that reported councillors — who make about $28,000 a year for part-time work — are looking to vote themselves in a pay raise between 30 per cent and 40 per cent in January.
Wright said on Thursday he works 12-hour days for his $28,000, and he’s happy to do so.
But the federal government “made a mistake” when it removed a tax break for city councillors, Wright said: starting in 2019, they no longer get one-third of their council salaries tax-free.
That will “hurt” some council-
lors, Wright said — although he says it won’t hurt him, that he’s prepared to do the job on the current salary.
For Wright, that’s a switch from a YourTV segment on the Politically Speaking show from Nov. 21.
“Council should get remunerated at a reasonable rate, to address the one-third tax treatment,” he said on the TV show.
But the last council did try to address the loss of that tax break: they voted for a $1,000 increase in their annual employment expenses.
That’s not enough for Coun. Keith Riel, who says he spoke to his accountant about it and learned he’d have to earn between $36,000 and $40,000 in council salary to make up for the lost tax break.
“Something’s got to be done about this one-third tax exemption that we’ve lost,” he said Thursday.
Council is expecting to be presented with some options in a city staff report due Jan. 14: last council voted to receive an “update” of the situation during budget talks.
Riel said he doesn’t know what that report will recommend, but he can guess: it could suggest that councillors keep all their receipts and write off business expenses such as a home office, he said, or it could suggest that councillors have a salary “top-up.”
Riel, who has previously said he works full-time at his council job and is underpaid, doesn’t like the idea of keeping all his receipts; he says that’s “labour-intensive.”
But Coun. Andrew Beamer says he won’t hear of any type of pay raise for councillors unless a citizen committee is struck and recommends the idea.
A citizens’ committee did that work in 2017, however, and recommended no pay raise — which Beamer says is fine.
“We’re paid fairly,” he said. “It’s a part-time job…. I knew what the compensation as when I ran. I think the pay is fair.”
Mayor Diane Therrien, who’d asked for the review of council’s pay last term, wrote in an email to The Examiner Thursday that she awaits the city staff report from CAO Sandra Clancy, to see what’s recommended.
Coun. Dean Pappas said he expects the report to outline what other municipalities are doing to compensate for the lost tax exemption for their councillors, as a comparative measure.
He said any suggestion that councillors are looking to vote themselves in a pay raise is simply “weird politics” being played out in a newspaper column.
“I think that’s straight speculation,” he said of the column.
But Garth Wedlock, who chaired the 2017 citizens’ committee that considered whether council was underpaid, said he wasn’t impressed if councillors really are thinking of giving themselves a raise.
“Councillors come into an election with their eyes wide open,” he said. “They know what the pay is.”
Jeff Westlake, who was also on the committee and ran for council in the Oct. 22 election, said that if councillors are considering a raise it’s “a tremendous lack of respect” for the work he, Wedlock and the rest of the committee did.
“To discard the balanced approach recommended in our report as one of the first orders of business for this council would appear to demonstrate that they have no respect for tax dollars, no respect for consultation or for the citizen committees that undertake such,” he stated. “I’m hopeful this will wake some folks up, and they can start to question what kind of stewards this council will be for our public purse.”