Council getting raise on Friday
Salaries to rise by the inflation rate for Vancouver
Kelowna Mayor Colin Basran will ring in the New Year on Friday with a pay raise but he won’t get the extra money for a few weeks.
The mayor and the eight councillors see their pay bumped every Jan. 1, in line with changes in the Consumer Price Index.
Currently, Basran makes $110,073.57 annually and each of the eight councillors are paid $37,409.41.
Their salary increases will match changes in the CPI published by Statistics Canada for Vancouver for the period between January 2020 and December 2020. That information is typically published by StatsCan in late January of each year.
In January 2020, Basran and the eight councillors got a pay raise of 2.3%. They got a raise of 2.7% in January 2019.
In addition to his salary, Basran gets free use of a city car, with gas and repairs paid by the city. In 2019, he also claimed expenses of $14,570.
For councillors, the expense accounts in 2019 ranged from a low of $262 for Mohini Singh to a high of $7,690 for Loyal Wooldridge, who was first elected in the 2018 civic election.
Linking salaries of elected officials to changes in the CPI, a change that took effect in 2014, was intended to depoliticize the issue of council remuneration.
Prior to the change in practice, the city occasionally struck so-called citizen review panels to look at how much Kelowna councillors earned compared to their municipal counterparts elsewhere, consider their workload, and decide if changes were warranted.
In 2011, a review panel recommended pay for Kelowna’s mayor and council should be frozen for two years, saying the local economy had still not recovered from the 2008 recession and that elected officials should demonstrate fiscal leadership by accepting a pay freeze.
The council of the day, led by former mayor Sharon Shepherd (who was paid $91,000, though one-third of it was tax-free under provisions common at the time) unanimously agreed to the two-year salary freeze.
“In a tight fiscal climate, we're leading by example,” Kevin Craig, one of the councillors at the time, said in September 2011.