Last year I wrote about a proposal in Cobourg to increase their council’s pay, and why such proposals are always controversial. No politician wants to appear greedy, so we typically go many years with no adjustment to politician paycheques, until it can’t be ignored anymore; at that point, the increase to get pay back up to market levels is huge, and the politicians who vote for it get a lot of flack for it.
On this week’s agenda is a pay raise for Brighton’s council members. What was an interesting topic to think and write about last year is now something I have to make a decision about. My perspective on the issue hasn’t changed, and honestly, I don’t feel as nervous writing this post as I remember feeling last year. The residents of Brighton have impressed me with their civility and good attitudes about municipal spending, even during a year when everything was getting more expensive. Last year I also felt nervous about a 7% tax increase, but we had no negative feedback: people understood that good services cost what they cost, and that failing to maintain them comes with even greater costs in the long run. This year we are looking at a similar increase, and while a few residents have expressed to me their desire to keep tax increases low, the few who have come to Committee of the Whole sessions have offered no comment.
(I am conscious that what I’m taking as residents having no complaints may just be residents offering no complaints, so I want to urge you all: if you have concerns, please let us know! I’m happy to talk through it and hear your perspective!)
Proposed Pay Increase
So what’s actually proposed in Brighton? If approved, my pay would rise to $23,503 per year, plus a per diem rate for meetings of $75 for meetings under 4 hours or $150 for meetings over 4 hours. Currently, I make around $18k, with per diem rates of $60 for meetings under 3 hours and $120 for meetings over 3 hours. (Most meetings that go over 3 hours are just barely over, so the overall expenditure for per diems might actually go down as the threshold is raised to 4 hours). What’s your take? Is this raise unreasonable?
There’s talk in the bylaw of cell phone/laptop allowances. We already receive a municipal-issued tablet, and have a choice between either being issued a cell phone or being given an allowance for one; it appears here that the bylaw would change the existing situation, ensuring that we all purchase our own equipment subject to the allowance policy. Some councillors prefer to not use personal devices for anything council related, as our personal devices can be subject to search by authorities if there’s a freedom of information request or integrity commissioner or police investigation, which can cause problems if we also work with other sensitive information in another context, etc. To balance the accountability and personal privacy of councillors, this kind of allowance is necessary.
There’s also mention of a $2000 personal health spending account, which I generally think is a good idea, as Canada still has very poor mental health coverage in our healthcare system. We have no other benefits that come with our pay, and no pension, so this is a big change. The stresses of office are known to be increasing across the country, as Canadian politics gets more polarized and aggressive, and I know several fantastic people who would make wonderful leaders who nevertheless don’t even want to engage in politics because the toll on their mental health would be too great. Little things like a health spending account can work wonders in keeping councillors at their best when they need to make tough decisions, and can make it easier for people with leadership qualities to make the sacrifice of entering public life.
In Context
The “Council Expenditures” line item in the budget is increasing by 25% because of these proposed changes. That sounds like a lot, but in actual numbers it’s a total budget increase of $60,871, which amounts to just over 0.5% tax increase. That’s about $13 added to my property tax bill, which I think is a bit below average for Brighton. It’s not nothing, but it’s not a lot.
The context of this proposal is a compensation review. Periodically, we hire a consultant to look at how much municipal employees get paid in similarly sized municipalities, to see what the “market rate” for comparable jobs is. The compensation review is not a public document, because we can’t disclose staff salaries and other HR matters, but the point is that we want to make sure that we can compete on wages. As I wrote last week, municipal staff can go just about anywhere these days, so paying them well pays off! But included in that report was a review of council salaries, which showed that they were quite low compared to other municipalities in our region and of our size. So to be clear, no councillor proposed this; it was part of a periodic review of all salaries in the municipality, and because it has been so long since this was done for council salaries, it returned a significant result that prompted the CAO to write this proposed bylaw.
The other point of context that I think is worth mentioning is that, while council salaries are often a point of conflict, the amount of money spent on council indirectly, in the form of accountability mechanisms, is also significant. The amount of money we spend to elect councils, and then to ensure that they don’t screw up (e.g., municipal solicitors, integrity commissioners, and of course the good counsel of our clerks), and then to address what happens when they do screw up (fines from the Ministry, court cases and tribunals, etc), can sometimes dwarf the salaries and expenses of councillors many times over! These costs are what is needed to have an effective representative democracy, and I think that’s worthwhile. Moreover, I think that expenditures that keep councillors happy, healthy, and focused on their work can help save us money in the long run by reducing the incidence of councils behaving badly, with all of the costs that can cause.
Moving Forward
Perhaps most important in this bylaw is the part that notes that salaries will increase annually based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI) – which is to say that they will rise with inflation. This de-politicizes the issue: no longer will we see council salaries stagnate for decades at a time, prompting a sudden increase that fuels nasty politics and public frustration. While there may be future compensation reviews that indicate that it should be increased, it shouldn’t come up with double-digit increases and political conflict.
What do you think? Is this change warranted? I still have many questions to ask on Monday night, and I’m obligated to keep an open mind until a vote is called in any case. Let me know your thoughts!
Surely councillors play a different role than municipal employees/staff. Perhaps councillors should be paid a stipend, as opposed to a salary, for their contributions to the governance, as opposed to the operation, of the town.
Thanks Dave. I’m not entirely sure of the difference, so I looked up stipend and the definition was “a fixed regular sum paid as a salary or as expenses to a clergyman, teacher, or public official.” Whatever we’d like to call it, I get the impression that your point was that a smaller sum would be more appropriate.
You’ve touched on a critical distinction, one that I’ve written about before: council is not supposed to be involved in the operations of the municipality. That said, governance work is still work, and it’s entirely possible to work full-time, or nearly so, performing strictly governance tasks in Brighton. I know because I do! And while a nonprofit board is often made up of volunteers (I currently volunteer as a board member for two nonprofits), those positions usually involve one meeting per month, whereas councillors often have 2-3 meetings per week plus being on-call for resident concerns, reading hundreds of pages of staff reports, and attending relevant training and networking events to further the position of the municipality and our own capacities as leaders and decision-makers. As we continue to grow, I suspect that in the next decade or two we will see full-time councillors in Northumberland municipalities, likely Brighton among them. For now, though, we can still remember the days when councillors were more or less volunteers!