With the current budget including a potential raise for members of council, folks in Brighton are talking about what the position seems worth to them. As I wrote last week, I’m generally in favour of paying councillors well; I recognize that I’m biased in this regard, as a raise from $18k to $23k base salary would be very much appreciated in my household, but I would support that raise even if I were not on council. (Noting, as always, that I won’t make a final decision until we’ve had a fulsome discussion in public!)
One of the arguments I’ve heard against council salary increases is that this is a second job for us, with the implication that it’s extra income based on part-time work. The idea that this is “extra income” is understandable: traditionally, people who run for public office are already successful business people, often retired, who don’t rely on the income from the position. But I think we’re all aware at this point that typical politicians are old rich guys; we hear regularly about how such people don’t always represent the diverse perspectives of the communities they serve. And even some of the resentment toward council salary increases reflect that: why should councillors get more money, since they don’t really need it? If we assume that councillors will be rich old guys, then we don’t need to give them more money; but if we don’t give them more money, people who aren’t rich and retired aren’t likely to even run for the job, so we’ll never get anyone but rich and/or retired people. To be clear: being rich and retired is not a reason someone should not be on council; I value their contributions immensely. But if the pay structure prevents anyone but that group from participating, that’s a problem. Paying members of council a wage that eliminates barriers to entry for people who otherwise couldn’t afford to take on the job allows more people to participate in our government.
The other part of the argument above is that people often don’t know what a councillor actually does. Yes, this is a “part-time job”; even I have difficulty arguing for it to be a full-time position, and the amount of actual work that goes into it can vary a lot from one councillor to another. That makes it hard for people to judge its value. So here’s a rundown of a week in my life as a councillor, and I’ll try to come up with a number that would reflect my hourly wage by the end.
Monday
On most Monday evenings we have either a Council meeting or a Council Planning meeting, usually on alternating weeks. The distinction is that the regular Council meetings cover pretty much everything except planning matters; Planning meetings cover all of the planning applications, including subdivisions and severances and zoning matters, as well as some of the infrastructure matters related to them. On a typical Monday, I spend 1-2 hours reviewing the agenda for the coming meeting. Monday is also the day of the week when everyone wakes up with things to do and motivation to do it, so I get more emails on Monday than most other days, meaning I also spend 1-2 hours most Mondays answering emails. Then the evening council meeting usually takes 1.5-3 hours, though depending on the items on the agenda it can be as short as five minutes (it happened once!) or as long as 4.5 hours (I don’t think we’ve broken the 5 hour mark). We arrive 15-30 minutes early for meetings, as there’s some set-up work to be done, and often chat with staff afterward to get more information about matters, as well as checking in with each other to maintain good relationships on council.
So council work takes up somewhere between 3 and 8 hours of my Monday, almost every week.
Tuesday-Friday
The rest of the week has more variation, depending on the frequency of committee meetings. Most committees meet no more than once a month, and some much less frequently. I am on the following committees:
- Landfill Liaison Committee — we’ve only met once!
- Accessibility Committee — we meet ~6x/year, and host 1-2 events per year.
- Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee — we meet ~4x/year, and host 1-3 events per year. I serve as vice-Chair, which comes with a bit of extra organizing work.
- Environmental Sustainability Committee — we meet ~6x/year, and contribute to 1-2 events per year. I’m also on a subcommittee of this committee, that meets almost as often as the main committee.
- Lower Trent Conservation Authority Board of Directors — we meet monthly, with occasional special meetings.
- Strategic Plan Review Team — we met as needed, a total of 5 or 6 times last year with 3 public events, before we disbanded. This group may form again next year to review and update the strategic plan, if needed.
- The Northumberland Inter-Municipal Task Force on Housing and Homelessness — I serve as the Chair for this group, which has so far met 3 times; I’m currently planning the next meeting for sometime next month. This group is not a committee of council, and therefore there is no remuneration for attending these meetings.
So on a given week I have on average one committee meeting to attend. These meetings usually last ~2 hours, and there’s 1-2 hours of prep before the meeting to read the agenda in full. Some are much more: a Lower Trent Conservation Authority agenda is usually hundreds of pages long. Others are much less, and of course it varies from one meeting to the next. But assuming 90 minutes for each committee meeting (Lower Trent is usually longer, some committees are usually shorter, but on the whole 90 minutes is a conservative estimate) and another 60-90 minutes of prep each, I estimate I spend about 3 hours a week on committees.
I would also estimate that I spend twice that amount of time per week researching and networking around the topics of my committees. That includes some of my Chair duties for the Task Force, taking courses on municipal matters and related topics (many of which I pay for myself), and connecting with colleagues on other councils and municipal staff. That also includes events: business openings, galas, conferences, and the like. This past Thursday I was a speaker at the Northumberland Community Legal Clinic’s annual Justice Forum (I’ll write about that next week), which ran from 9:30 to 4:30; I had to duck out from 1-3 for the Lower Trent Conservation Authority’s Annual General Meeting, which I attended virtually from my car in the parking lot of the Cobourg Community Centre, before returning to the Justice Forum; and from there I went straight to Lola’s Cafe for the Brighton Downtown Business Improvement Association’s Annual General Meeting, where I also gave a brief address. I was gone from 8:30am to 7:30pm, and only two hours of that was “official” municipal business, though all of it was certainly legitimate councillor work.
My Tuesdays are usually free, I think I only have one committee that meets on a Tuesday. I still spend an hour or so catching up on municipal emails, and I think it’s safe to say that I do that almost every day.
Wednesdays can get busy seasonally, as that’s when we tend to have Committee of the Whole meetings. Those are usually longer than regular Council meetings, as we’re usually dealing with complex issues like the budget, the strategic plan, or sensitive matters like CAO recruitment. But through most of the year we don’t have Committee of the Whole meetings. Even so, there were 18 meetings that were either Committee of the Whole or “Special Council” meetings in 2023, which included budget and strategic planning, but also special training sessions, several of which were all-day sessions, as well as meetings to address particular timely matters.
On Thursday I get my first look at the draft agenda for next Monday’s meeting. Sometime between Thursday and Saturday, I spend ~3-5 hours going through the agenda package, which can run up to 500 pages. The staff reports in the agenda package are designed so that they can be skimmed easily, with an executive summary and staff recommendation at the top before going into all of the details. It is possible, and even acceptable, to just read those summaries and recommendations and still be informed enough to make a good decision. And some councillors who have less time to devote to meeting prep do so. I tend to try to read all of the details of reports, though especially with Planning reports there are large sections of standard wording that I know I can always skim or skip. Even so, giving the agenda its due takes a lot of time.
On Friday the finalized agenda goes public, sometimes with a few new additions that I need to catch up on. Sometimes this means I get extra emails from residents who have seen the agenda and want to know my thoughts on something. Even so, I still probably only spend an hour on communications.
Weekends
Every week I try to write a blog post to communicate matters like this to you, dear reader. Sometime on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday I sit down for 3-4 hours to write, sometimes with additional research, and send it out via a newsletter. I used to spend quite a bit of time, spread throughout the week, trying to communicate such things via Facebook; I found that it ate up a lot more of my time than it seemed to be worth. (So if you see people online talking about things like this, please just share this blog post with them!)
For the most part I find that municipal events don’t happen on weekends. I’m grateful for that, it helps to have stable routines with my kids on the weekend!
Hourly Wage?
Since the length of any given meeting can vary widely, and the amount of time to prepare for each meeting can vary widely, and the amount of time spent talking with residents and colleagues and undergoing training can vary widely, it’s impossible to say exactly how many hours per week any given councillor works. But based on my own schedule, as detailed above, I estimate that I put in the following hours:
- 3-8 hours every Monday
- 3-5 hours reviewing the agenda and related documents Thurs-Sat
- 3 hours per week on committees
- 6 hours per week on training, events, networking, and research
- Another 5-6 hours per week communicating with staff and residents
- On average 1 hour per week on CoW or special council meetings
- 3-4 hours per week on this blog
In total, that’s 24-33 hours per week that I spend on council-related matters. Still short of a full-time job, but not so much that it leaves room for a full-time job. I know that some of my councillor colleagues DO have full-time jobs, and they put less time in, though they still do an excellent job on council. Even so, they struggle to schedule everything, and make sacrifices of their personal and family time to fit council activities in. Everyone currently on council is either retired or has somewhat flexible working hours; anyone who had a steady, 40-hour job probably couldn’t sit on council at all. (I should also add that most of us have other volunteer work as well; I sit on two non-profit boards that meet monthly and entail other responsibilities.)
For ease of calculation, let’s just say it’s a 20 hour per week part-time job, and let’s assume that we get two weeks off – so 20×50 = 1,000 hours of work per year. Our current salaries are just under $18,000/year, plus our meeting per diems and cell phone allowance, which works out to around $23k/year. At that rate, we make roughly $23 per hour. That puts us right around what would be considered a living wage in Northumberland for a full-time job. Since this is only part-time, it’s more complicated; trying to fit a profitable career around these duties is challenging.
And because we’re paid a fixed amount for variable hours, we’re incentivized to put in less time rather than more. I am not required to do all of the training and communication that I do, and by these rough calculations I’m putting in 4-13 hours per week as unpaid volunteer time; if we accounted for that time and divided that ~$23k by the maximum hours per week I work (33), I’d actually be making $14/hour. I’m happy to do that, because I think it makes me a better councillor, but adding the proposed ~$5k/year raise certainly makes it easier for me to do so (bringing it up to ~$28k/year for 1650 hours per year, or almost $17/hr), and accounts for some of the income from other sources I lose by using my time for council rather than for other work.
Value for Money
The numbers and analysis above are far from scientific, and as I said, it varies a lot week to week and from one councillor to another. But the amount that residents value our work varies even more: some feel that there are too many councillors, and some likely even feel that none would still be too many. I hope that this post has given some context that makes it clear just what we do with our time, but whether or not you think that time is worth anything is entirely up to you. Do you think that Brighton is better off having engaged councillors? Do you think it’s better for us to have more diversity on council? Leave a comment below, or send me an email – I’d love to hear from you, and I usually respond on the same day that I receive an email.