Some easy wins for city council

Congratulations, Lyn Hall, on your re-election Saturday night. Congratulations to the six incumbents – Frank Everitt, Garth Frizzell, Murry Krause, Terri McConnachie, Susan Scott and Brian Skakun – on your re-election to city council. Special congratulations to Cori Ramsay and Kyle Sampson, the two new councillors victorious in their first efforts running for public office.

Congratulations to the new School District 57 trustees and Regional District of Fraser-Fort George directors.

There is so much work to do, as McConnachie said in her campaign announcement.

With that in mind, here are two suggestions for the first 100 days of this new city council:

• Senior management wages

There’s nothing to be done about the huge wage hikes handed out by city manager Kathleen Soltis to the rest of the executive team at the City of Prince George (which also grew from seven to nine people under her tenure).

But that can come to a grinding halt immediately and Ramsay could lead the charge on a long-term solution to make sure such increases don’t go forward in future without city council input.

Before she ran for city council, Ramsay spent the first half of this year chairing a citizen’s committee that reviewed the income of the mayor and city council. This committee is formed of local applicants at the beginning of each election year to make recommendations to the current mayor and council about what the next mayor and council – the ones who get elected in the fall election – should be paid during their fouryear mandate.

So how about lumping the city manager and the rest of the city’s top bureaucrats in with city council and leaving their wage reviews in the hands of a citizen committee once every four years? But senior bureaucrats aren’t political positions, some might argue.

Even if one were to accept that as true (which it’s not), that doesn’t mean their wages can’t be assessed by a group of citizens, with recommendations to the council of the day.

As for dollars and cents, it saves the city from commissioning yet another consultant’s report on senior management wages at the City of Prince George.

Motion: Immediately freeze the wages of the city manager, the four general managers and the four directors at the City of Prince George until June 2022, pending the citizens committee report and review by mayor and council about whether to pass all or some of the committee’s recommendations.

• Senior management overtime policy

Of the new city council, only Brian Skakun consistently campaigned to do more than just look at the wages and the overtime policy for senior management. Skakun wants changes, said so, and was the top vote-getter for city council.

With that in mind, Skakun can push for a serious overhaul and he’s got plenty of latitude to do so.

As the 2017 consultant’s report into senior management compensation points out, “exempt overtime polices and practices vary widely” among the nine comparison municipalities in B.C. There is no provincial standard because all nine of those local governments do something different.

Furthermore, two of the nine municipalities have “no formal overtime policy,” which is government speak for no overtime pay will be granted because in the public sector, if there is no written policy or procedure, it doesn’t happen.

One of the municipalities with no overtime gives the city manager the discretion to grant up to five days off to senior staff in lieu of overtime. The other municipality with no overtime encourages the top bureaucrats “adjust their work schedule to accommodate having to work extra hours.”

That’s a nice way of telling managers to use time management when it comes to their own jobs, to recognize that there are busier times of year than others and to take extra time when available during slower weeks and months of the year. That’s the unwritten rule across most of the private sector and much of the public sector.

Since there is no B.C. standard for overtime pay, there is plenty of room for a made-in-Prince George, Skakun-style policy.

Motion: The City of Prince George rescinds its exempt employee overtime procedure in its entirety and adopts the “adjust your work schedule to accommodate extra hours worked” policy, with oversight by the city manager.

It’s important to stress that neither of these changes are punishments. Local residents are well-served by Soltis and her team. Instead, city council gets the oversight it should have over the wages of senior managers but through the lens of a citizen committee while paid overtime for the top people gets the well-deserved boot.

Two quick and easy wins to get started for this new city council.

The voters have spoken.

The power is in the hands of mayor and council now.