Here’s an idea – pay cuts at city hall

One small detail from the recent sorry saga surrounding the extraordinary claim of a 12 per cent rates hike for Hamilton residents touted by mayor Andrew King, was the response from the CEO, Richards Briggs. He admitted, (what else could he do) that the bombshell delivered to city councillors just a couple of hours before the meeting was perhaps a tad short on a heads-up. But it wasn’t that particular bungle that caught my special attention. Rather it was the subsequent revelation that the CEO has since hired consultants to ‘‘write up a narrative report to better explain the situation’’ to councillors.

What! The CEO screws up and then he has to employ others (at great expense) to clean up his mess. No, Mr Briggs, we don’t employ you to employ others to do the work you should be doing yourself. And if you are not capable of doing it yourself, then perhaps you should look for other employment. Is this one of the reasons why we find ourselves in the financial poo, needing massive rate rises?

How is it, one asks, that things have suddenly nose-dived so that we find ourselves in such a financial quandary? The populace is getting mixed messages from various quarters about the state of the books. Is this just a case of I see a duck, you see a rabbit?

Perspective is an interesting component in how one views the world, best summed up by F Scott Fitzgerald in his famous line about the wealthy. ‘‘Let me tell you about the very rich,’’ he begins in a short story entitled, The Rich Boy. ‘‘They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early and it does something to them …’’

What it does is alter their perspective, their frame of reference. A rich man sees the world differently from a poor man. People of meagre means have a completely different take on the world than those in the upper income bracket. Someone on a city council CEO salary or a millionaire money lender and car dealer would think nothing of slapping on ratepayers a 12 per cent increase. In their world it’s peanuts. The same goes for the suggestion of charging people $25 each to visit the Hamilton Gardens. It’s small change for those earning in triple figures.

A rich man thinks nothing of incurring half a million dollars in costs to the ratepayers of a city by opposing the District Plan. It’s chicken feed. So it plunges the city in deeper debt. Well, no matter, it’s merely nickels and dimes and pin money to the well-to-do with deep pockets.

Raising rates by such exorbitant levels is also a lazy man’s way of solving a problem. One doesn’t need a degree in accounting or business studies to employ such a tactic. No hard or imaginative thinking is required by some hotshot high salaried suit in the job.

Let me, one of the $12,000-a-year demographic, offer ideas to help reduce the city debt incurred by those we’ve employed to manage our finances. And they are for free. I’ll not be charging consultant fees at $200 an hour.

Let’s start with pay rates. No one needs to be paid a CEO salary of $380,000 a year to keep a ledger account. In fact, nobody needs that sort of money in any job in order to live. Why are we paying people such exorbitant rates of pay well above what is required to live a reasonably comfortable life? The answer is that nebulous quality called status. There’s also that other equally tenuous element in the mix called, look what the other bloke down the road is getting.

The workload and responsibility of doctors, nurses, teachers, police, chippies, plumbers, caregivers and a host of others doing the hard yards is equal to or more than any CEO’s I would argue, but the remuneration is not the same. Why? Because the world that partakes of the political administrative economy exists in a strange and rarefied atmosphere that gives itself eminence beyond its calling and where the rules that govern there don’t apply to the rest of us mere mortals.

We could save ourselves $300,000 a year simply by slashing the CEO’s base rate – $80,000 is ample for any person to live on. Generous in fact.

The mayor collects $156,000 per year. The man could live comfortably on half that. Councillors work part-time in the position, (some of them have other jobs) but for some strange reason they get fulltime pay, ($70,000 and upward) unlike the rest of us if we did the same elsewhere. The world and its practices are upside down and back to front.

We could save ourselves a bundle if the world operated on different assumptions, values and standards.

Here’s another tip for free. Fix the Founders Theatre instead of spending millions on some grandiose plan, or alternatively, rejig the Claudelands Event Centre since it is already a grandiose monument.

And the River Plan. Great idea but why is it costing millions just to conduct design processes. This is ludicrous. Someone is being taken for a ride.

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