Kamloops council deserves a COLA, but does it deserve more?

When Kelowna council voted to put a freeze on its own salaries, it was natural to ask Kamloops council members what they thought of the idea. So we did.

And that was bound to begin a new discussion about whether our own councilors are paid too much, which it did.

Some of our council incumbents are of the mind that they haven’t had a pay increase recently, which they have.

It’s human nature to fret about how much we pay our politicians, and sometimes it’s justified.

Since 2002, City council has received cost of living increases. Plagued by the annual curse of trying to determine how much it should pay itself (for municipal politicians are unhappily charged with determining how much their own compensation), the council of the day decided to go in a different direction.

First, it set up a committee that included lawyer and former councilor Ron Watson, businessman Ric Laidlaw, and veterinarian and former councilor Russ Gerard. The trio was asked to come up with a recommendation on what council should receive.

At the time, the mayor was paid $57,400 a year, councilors $16,800. There was a feeling among the councilors that they should get a third of the mayor’s paycheque.

But when the committee came back with a proposal that the mayor get $75,000 and councilors get a boost to $22,500, council thought it was too much and turned it down. It would have amounted to 30 per cent and 34 percent respectively.

Later on, the council implemented a cost-of-living increase, taking increases out of its own hands.

While some current councilors don’t consider a COLA to be a raise, that’s what it is — a modest increase designed for fairness. Meanwhile, of course, other B.C. councils have moved significantly ahead of what our Kamloops reps are paid.

So, what to do? The suggestion that Kamloops council should freeze its own salaries is unfair. It deserves to keep up to increases in the cost of everyday goods and services. Question is, should it be looking at what their colleagues get in other cities?

That, in turn, becomes a keeping up with the Jones issue. If the rates as established a few years ago at the start of the COLA era were fair, what has changed that makes them no longer adequate?

Other than the issue of what other councils and mayors make, nothing. Participation in local politics is, in good dose, volunteer work, but it’s too much to expect councilors to do as much as they do week in and week out. In the case of the mayor, it’s a full-time job and those who go into it give up their  normal source of income.

The only question that remains, therefore, is whether our own council is paid adequately for what it does. So let’s do some arithmetic.

Last week was a fairly average week for councilors, although public engagements tend to pick up steam as we get deeper into fall. Tuesday’s council meeting was fairly short, lasting a couple of hours. The in-camera meeting beforehand was probably about an hour. There was a public hearing in the evening that required another three hours.

Some councilors attended the public forum on the parkade, which took up another couple of hours. A good read of the weekly council agenda in preparation for the meeting usually takes a couple of hours.

Add, say another hour or two dealing with feedback and questions from residents. Events like the Terry Fox Run and the Battle of Britain are the sort of thing councilors often attend, so add a couple of more hours for that.

That gives us a relatively typical week of a dozen hours, since 10 to 15 hours a week is regarded as the normal range. Some councilors give much more of their time, some give the minimum.

At just over $24,000 a year, that comes to, say, $38 an hour. Whether you think that’s fair depends on your views on what is a reasonable wage, and what’s a reasonable wage for a politician.

Five of the nine members of council also serve on the regional district board and receive an additional $12,000 a year for attending once-a-month board meetings. For all of it, a third is tax free.

Plus, there’s travel to conferences and for lobbying, but currently there’s nothing way out of line there.

If the upcoming civic election is like others, the matter of pay will come up for debate. Bottom line: our mayor and council deserve something better than a freeze. The only question is whether it’s cost of living or something more.