Council should be more open about salary rise: Gazzola

KITCHENER — When Kitchener council members approved the 2018 budget on Monday, they also quietly approved a raise for themselves.

“It’s buried,” Coun. John Gazzola said of the pay hike. “It’s not transparent. That’s one of the areas that people need to know about. People should know that. Why not put it on the table?”

The city budget approved this week includes provisions to increase council salaries by 1.75 per cent on April 1. That is the same increase non-union staff at the city will get at that time. It’s slightly more than the Ontario inflation rate for 2017, which was about 1.66 per cent.

Council approved the increase when it approved the city’s 2018 operating budget, which includes a budget of $1.2 million for the mayor and council offices, for things such as their salaries, expenses, printing and staff, said Ryan Hagey, Kitchener’s director of financial planning.

“It dawned on me that, ‘Hey, what we’ve done, we just approved a raise to ourselves and nobody’s aware of it,’ ” Gazzola said in an interview Thursday.

“We really pat ourselves on the back about what a good job we do and how we’re transparent, but we’re not really transparent on a lot of things,” he said.

Kitchener councillors are currently paid $40,545, while the mayor gets $70,809, onethird of which is tax-free. That works out to the equivalent of a fully taxed salary of about $50,912 for councillors and $98,960 for the mayor, who also collects a regional salary of $57,493 and gets a leased car.

Gazzola said he would like to see council vote every year at budget time on a “single, separate resolution” that spells out any pay increase councillors are approving for themselves. “I will try to smarten up and try to bring it out” in future budget discussions, he said.

Increases to council pay are addressed in a city policy approved in 2002, after a citizens’ committee reviewed council compensation and recommended that council increases mirror those of non-union staff at city hall.

Although the increase isn’t explicitly spelled out in the budget each year, Hagey said it is nonetheless transparent because it follows long-standing city policy.

“The policy is known. It’s available and it’s being followed. It’s not as if we’re in an environment where it’s up to staff or council to propose whatever they want. It’s simply following a policy that’s known.”

However, the policy isn’t easy to find. There’s no mention of it on the city web page that spells out the previous year’s council salaries, as required by legislation. Nor is it easily found elsewhere on the city’s website; it doesn’t come up from search queries for “council compensation” or “council salary.”