Central Saanich is lined up to adopt changes to council remuneration which will see council pay increase by thousands in the coming fiscal year.
On Tuesday (Feb. 21), council approved 4-2 a motion to replace the list of comparable municipalities used to calculate council and mayor remuneration with a new list aimed at ensuring the district is referencing other communities more similar to itself. Voting against it were Couns. Zeb King and Gordon Newton.
According to a staff report presented during the meeting, council and mayoral pay for 2023 will increase to $30,800 and $66,700 based on the median remuneration of the list of comparator municipalities.
That’s up from the 2022 pay of $18,153 for councillors and $41,814 for the mayor. This is higher than the previously scheduled pay increase using the previous list of comparators, which would have seen pay in 2023 increase to $25,900 for councillors and $59,000 for the mayor.
Council pay is also adjusted annually based on the Greater Victoria region’s consumer price index under the district’s formula.
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The new list of comparators – which still faces a final adoption vote by council at a later date – adds Cranbrook, Fort St. John, Nelson, Powell River, Squamish and White Rock to the list, while removing North Saanich and Sidney. Colwood, Comox, Esquimalt, Lake Country, Oak Bay, Parksville, Pitt Meadows, Salmon Arm and Sooke remain from the old list.
In creating the new list, staff were directed to include B.C. municipalities with populations between 14,000 and 28,000 and to consider how similar service parameters such as budget, police, recreation and others are to the district.
”Some of the municipalities on the (old) list were quite a bit smaller than Central Saanich, both in terms of geography, complexity, and overall population size,” said Mayor Ryan Windsor. “I started looking at a broader set of municipalities … based on population and complexity … and we were down about $5,000 for a member of council across this broad list of municipalities.”
Windsor said Central Saanich council works just as hard as any other comparable council in the province, but there was “quite a disparity” between how their time was being valued, which he felt was unsustainable in the long term, hence the proposed change to the remuneration calculation.
But while a majority of council ended up agreeing with Windsor, municipal watchdog group the Grumpy Taxpayer$ released a statement Thursday (Feb. 23) questioning such large pay increases.
“Councils shouldn’t be increasing their own wages. This pay increase should have been brought up and defended by the last council to take effect with a new council,” said the group in the release, adding the increase “sends an unhelpful message to citizens” during “difficult inflationary times.”
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