COUNTY COUNCILLORS LOOKING AT PAY INCREASES

Elected official remuneration to increase to $468,205 under proposed hikes

TRURO, N. S. – Colchester County Council members have voted for a pay increase that, if approved, will see the mayor receiving the highest remuneration of all Nova Scotia municipalities outside of Halifax and CBRM.

The proposed hikes will put the deputy mayor and councillors on par with Kings County, which currently is the highest paid council in the province outside of the Halifax and Cape Breton regional municipalities.

Under the proposal, which has to be ratified through two bylaw readings, the mayor will receive $61,651 per year, the deputy mayor’s remuneration will increase to $43,394 and the 10 councillors will each receive $36,316 per year.

The largest portion of the proposed increases are to return council’s remuneration rate to the net income they received prior to federal government’s cancelation of a one-third tax credit that came into effect Jan. 1.

“I don’t have any problem justifying it,” said, District 4 Councillor Mike Cooper, who made the motion to increase the remuneration rate beyond the tax credit bump up.

“If people don’t agree with that, they have every right to disagree,” he said. “I’ve put a lot of thought into it and I thought it was a fair increase.”

Prior to the elimination of the one-third, non-taxable portion of income, Colchester’s mayor re

ceived an annual gross amount of $49,060 while the deputy mayor received $30,598 and each of the 10 councillors were paid $25,006.

Those figures were revised to $61,651 for the mayor; $38,451 for the deputy mayor and to $31,243 for each councillor to make up for the income lost through the elimination of the tax credit. If approved, those amounts will be retroactive to Jan. 1.

Under Cooper’s motion, however, council voted to increase the

deputy mayor’s rate by a further $4,943 and an additional $4,893 for each councillor.

If all the increases are approved, it will bring council’s total remuneration for this year from $329,718 to $468,205, a difference of $138,487.

First reading is set for a special council meeting on Tuesday evening with second reading planned for the June 27 council session, when the public will have the opportunity to address the issue.

Council last voted itself an increase in 2013, at which point a councillor’s annual remuneration was set at $23,700; deputy mayor $29,000; and the mayor $56,500. The difference between those rates and the current figures is due to a built-in annual inflation rate increase.

Council also passed a motion to set its annual increase based on an equal dollar value, incremental with the Consumer Price Index (CPI), instead of with a percentage of the CPI as it did in the past.

Blair said the increases put Colchester County Council’s remuneration on par with Kings County Council “with the notable exception that it does not include the extra benefits they receive.”

Information on those benefits was not immediately available. However, the proposed rate for the mayor’s remuneration is $2,885, higher than what is received by the mayor of Kings County.

“Colchester is pretty well one of the largest municipal units,” Blair said. “We’re pretty comparable with Kings County and that’s the county that we usually compare ourselves to. But we are a large geographic county, we have 38,000 population and a lot of responsibilities.”

Kings County has a population of 61,061.