More firefighters hit the Sunshine List

A new firefighter contract and rising management salaries is why St. Catharines property owners paid an additional $7.2 million to city hall in 2016 over the previous year.

The number of city employees on the annual Sunshine List — the list of Ontario public employees earning $100,000 or more — rose from 113 in 2015 to 167 in 2015.

St. Catharines Mayor Walter Sendzik said most of the increase is due to the collective agreement with the fire department. Along with pay increases, the deal included retroactive pay, adding several firefighters to the sunshine list.

The mayor said St. Catharines has reached a point where residents cannot afford the increasing costs of essential services like firefighters.

“I’m not blaming the firefighters. I am blaming the arbitration system which awards these kinds of increases,” he said. “You can say ‘Well, just raise your property taxes,’ but that is not a realistic option anymore. So you have to start looking at what you have to cut in order to pay for this.”

Some of the increasing costs of St. Catharines civil servants is also due to rising salaries among senior staff.

Sendzik said upper management salaries had been frozen for several years, but that freeze ended in 2016.

“So this is the first year you are seeing those increases,” he said.

The highest paid civil servant in St. Catharines is the city’s chief administrative officer Dan Carnegie who earned $217,354 in 2016, up from $205,956 the year before.

Also in the top five is the city’s commissioner of corporate services Shelley Chemnitz who earned $181,185, the commissioner of operations Bryan Shynal also at $181,185, St. Catharines fire chief David Wood at $169,645 and assistant platoon chief Michael LaPlante who earned $169,645.

Sendzik said the collective agreement with the fire department went to binding provincial arbitration in 2016, resulting in an agreement which significantly added to the city’s expenses.

“I have to say that our firefighters are doing work that no one else will when it comes to dealing with an emergency,” he said. “That said, we cannot afford these kinds of increases.”

The mayor said the fundamental issue is an arbitration system that doesn’t take into account a community’s ability to pay.

Sendzik said arbitrators compare the salaries of a community like St. Catharines against those in a larger, wealthier city like Toronto and sets contracted salaries against that comparison.

“It is not a fair comparison,” he said. “Just like comparing firefighters in Timmins against St. Catharines wouldn’t be fair.”

The province has to take a hard look at how arbitration works and intervene to ensure cities like St. Catharines can pay for emergency services, he said.

In January, Queen’s Park rejected an attempt by Ontario colleges to boost salaries of school administrators because the salary framework being used was “unacceptable.”

The framework set college salaries by comparing schools to much larger and more complex institutions like major hospitals. Niagara College, for example, with a budget of $220 million, was compared to Hamilton Health Sciences, which has a budget of more than $1 billion.

Under that system Niagara College president Dan Patterson would have seen his salary increase from $323,000 in 2015 to as much as $401,000. As it is, Patterson neared $335,000 in 2016.

Deputy Premier Deb Matthews rejected the salary formula because it was not mindful of provincial budgetary goals and ordered the colleges to restart the process from scratch.

Sendzik said the province needs to take a similar approach to emergency services for the same reason — cities have to be mindful of their budgetary limits.

However, Sendzik said Queen’s Park shows little interest in the issue.

“The province cares about the salaries at the colleges because those salaries come directly out of their budget,” he said. “When it comes to emergency services, that is paid for by the municipalities. If there was an Ontario fire service, like the Ontario Provincial Police, you’d see a much different level of interest from the province.”