Being mayor: Huge job, OK pay
Mayors can get big pay cheques but how do they earn that crust? Piers Fuller spoke to two former mayors about what the job entails.
You know you are busy when you have to schedule an appointment in your diary if you want to spend time with your children.
The Remuneration Authority has set new pay rates for mayors across New Zealand and Wellington’s mayor now gets more than $180,000 per annum, though few would argue they don’t earn it.
Former Wellington mayor Justin Lester, who lost his job by the slimmest of margins and had his bid for a vote recount dismissed last week, said being mayor of New Zealand’s capital was ‘‘all-consuming’’.
‘‘I loved the job, it is a fantastic job, but until you are in it, no-one understands how busy you are.
‘‘It was the biggest privilege of my career. It was the best job of my life but also the hardest job, because as well as everything else, you are under constant public scrutiny.’’
Getting up at the crack of dawn, a quick breakfast and an endless string of meetings, appointments and appearances often meant an 11 or 12-hour day. During campaign periods, he was clocking up 70 to 80 hours a week.
Lester’s diary ruled his life and this even applied to spending time with his children.
He had to schedule in dinner with his family on Mondays and to pick the children up for school on Fridays, and he tried to keep Sunday nights free. Anything else had to squeeze into the mayoral diary.
‘‘I saw my children for dinner, at most, two times a week. Often on a Saturday I would be out to five to seven events,’’ Lester said.
Even when they are not working, mayors need to be accessible.
It is impossible to grab a couple of items from the supermarket without someone stopping to tell you how the city should be run. ‘‘When you walk down the street, it takes twice as long to get anywhere.’’
Coaching children’s sports teams or volunteering for school working bees is out of the question. ‘‘I didn’t have a lunch break, I didn’t have breaks through the day and I had backto-back meetings from start to finish. If anything got behind, it meant you were chasing your tail all day long.’’
Although he certainly did not do it for the money, elected members across the board needed fair remuneration, Lester said.
‘‘If you don’t give good money, you don’t get good decisions.’’
The mayoral pay of the region’s smallest territorial authority, Carterton, has increased by more than 11 per cent to $83,500 in the new term.
Outgoing mayor John Booth said that even though he was in charge of a small district in terms of population, it was still a big role, particularly when he had to keep a farm ticking over in the background.
‘‘You can be the mayor of a big city and do a lot of different things but you can be the mayor of a small TA [territorial authority] and still have a similar workload.
‘‘In my time as mayor, it changed quite dramatically.
‘‘There was a lot more required than it was when I started. A lot more meetings and looking at matters that needed to be discussed at a governance level.’’
Unlike Lester, Booth had farm work to be done before heading into the Carterton District Council offices or after he headed home. ‘‘So they were bloody long days.’’
He said another difference for rural mayors was they spent a lot of time travelling throughout their districts and to regional meetings. ‘‘We did big kilometres, you are not only travelling in your own district but in adjoining districts and also over the hill into Wellington.
‘‘I found it to be a wonderful experience to be in contact with people from all walks of life from prime ministers to ordinary people who want to sit down and have a chat to you about what is going on in their lives in their area.’’
At the start of the electoral term last month, the independent Remuneration Authority bumped up mayoral salaries. Councils across the Wellington region and Hawke’s Bay are in the process of setting their councillor pay rates. Wellington’s mayoralty got less than a 2 per cent pay rise, while some of the districts’ mayoralties such as Porirua, Masterton and South Wairarapa had pay rises of over 10 per cent. Remuneration Authority chairwoman Fran Wilde, herself a past Wellington mayor, said the independent body in charge of setting pay rates had recently put a lot of effort into finding out exactly what goes into mayoral and council roles to determine what is a fair rate of pay.
‘‘There is always a lot of pressure on local politicians not to pay themselves very much.’’
The salaries of New Zealand’s mayors are scaled down from the biggest territorial authority, Auckland Council.
‘‘It was very clear to us that even in small councils, more often than not being the mayor is a fulltime job. For a big metropolitan mayor, it is a huge job. Every day, every night – you get very little time at all.’’
Wilde said that in many ways, there was more pressure on mayors than Cabinet ministers.
‘‘Being the mayor is like being the Speaker of the House and the prime minister in one job, and also mayors usually don’t have the depth of support staff that a Cabinet minister will have. It can be quite a lonely job,’’ Wilde said.
Flexibility in councillor pay
The way councillors are paid has changed in this term.
The Remuneration Authority sets minimum amounts for councillors but the councils can decide how a dedicated pool of money is divided up, with the option for extra pay for special roles such as committee chairs or the deputy mayor.
The payment pool was set but the number of councillors was not, so a council could choose to reduce or increase the number of councillors, which would have an effect on their remuneration.
‘‘We said: here is a pool money for each council relative to the size of the governance role and you guys decide how you want to split that up,’’ Wilde said.
Outgoing Masterton councillor John Dalziell suggested to his council that it was a role that required a lot of commitment and councils should consider electing fewer councillors but pay them more.
‘‘Some of them [fellow councillors] don’t commit themselves to meetings and they have other jobs, so they don’t turn up to a lot of workshops and there is no penalty.
‘‘If you had the same pool of money and said let’s have five councillors or six councillors, then you would virtually double the salary which hopefully would mean the councillors were more committed.’’