The Town sent out an email this afternoon with the missing Attachment #1 from this week’s council meeting agenda. Here is a link to the full attachment. The key tables are presented below.
Having covered the activities of Council for more than two terms I have no issue with the remuneration our councillors receive. It’s lots of hours and lots of complaints. If you disagree, this is your chance to put forward your name for Council. I expect there will be a couple of openings. It’s a much tougher job than anyone really expects. It can be very rewarding in terms of contributing to the community, but it’s a grind. The compensation is just a way of saying thank you for the service.
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April 19, 2018 at 3:55 pm
Hi Joe,
Thank you for keeping us informed!
Are the Mayor’s expenses listed on the website … I can’t find them… how does one review those?
Thanks, Lynne
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April 19, 2018 at 3:59 pm
Jamie’s expenses are there at the top of the first table in this post. I don’t know what’s on the website, I’m not very impressed by its functionality. That’s why I usually attach documents rather than ask people to find them on the Town’s website.
April 19, 2018 at 6:37 pm
The Mayor has elected to attend “all” of the extra curricular functions of Council like, Ontario Good Roads, Ontario Small Urban Municipalities, Federation of Northern Ontario Municipalities, AMO, and all other out of Town functions? When I was on Council, individual Councillors were granted a $2000.00 per year limit on attending these various functions. Total Council expenditures totaled $14,000.00 for out of Town Conventions in my time.
The Mayors total remuneration is extremely excessive in my opinion. fwiw
April 20, 2018 at 4:37 pm
Define extremely excessive? What do you think a reasonable level of compensation would be? What would you base that number on?
To my mind, they should get a fair hourly rate. Their compensation should be roughly the same as a fair hourly rate multiplied by the number of hours they work.
So what would a fair hourly rate be? Minimum wage is $15, right? My mechanic charges $80. Assuming that “mayor of a decent sized town” should rate somewhere between a McDonald’s worker and a mechanic, how’s $50 an hour sound?
Now, a full time job is about 2000 hours a year. Part time would be a half of that. Does the mayor put in around 20 hours a week? I’d suspect so. In any case, that would work out to around $50,000 a year. He’s only being paid $36.9k. So if anything i’d suggest he’s under compensated.
I’m no fan of mcgarvey’s performance as mayor. I think his handling of the mcwalter affair showed a lack of integrity from which he has not recovered, in my opinion. But I still don’t think you should begrudge a working man a fair paycheque.
And besides, with mayors as with most things, you get what you pay for.
April 20, 2018 at 8:13 pm
When I was on Council, the Mayor’s remuneration was about $8000.00 more than what a Councillor was paid which was about $12000.00 plus Maximum $2000.00 in expenses
April 20, 2018 at 8:57 pm
What year were you on council cliff? Are you remembering to account for inflation?
According to the bank of canada ( https://www.bankofcanada.ca/rates/related/inflation-calculator/ ) a salary of $8000 in 1970 would be equivalent to just over $52k in today’s dollars. In you were on council later, say in the late 1970’s, the equivalent in today’s dollars drops to around $38k per year. So depending on when you were on council, it could very well be that remuneration has simply kept up with inflation.
It’s important to keep up with inflation, of course: anything less is effectively a paycut.
April 20, 2018 at 9:22 pm
Actually it hasn’t kept up. Council hasn’t approved a raise for themselves in 4 years or more. They don’t like the optics of even raising their remuneration by inflation. That have approved an increase to the Mayor’s salary, but that’s it.
Cliff, what did a cup of coffee cost when you were on Council? What was the price of a Big Mac? The Big Mac index is one of the benchmarks for inflation and the relative value of currencies in different countries given its almost global presence.
I have been watching Council for more than two terms at this point. I don’t begrudge them their compensation. What seems easy turns out to be a grind. Everyone is quick to criticize, but they don’t have the time to attend meetings or even read the council meeting packages. Show up for a year’s worth of council meetings, including budget meetings, and you will get an idea of what a quarter of the job entails in terms of time commitment. You will also need to get a feel for the complaints you will get about services, taxes, by-laws and the salaries of Staff and Council. Some thanks, but mostly bitching.
April 20, 2018 at 10:02 pm
I have absolutely no beef about the remuneration of Councillors @17K. They deserve that amount . It is the spread between the Mayor’s salary and the rest of Council. It should not be more than 10 K in my opinion.
So you say the Mayor got a raise some time ago? And Councillor’s did not? Why so?
April 20, 2018 at 11:57 pm
Cliff, you didn’t answer my question: what years were you on council?
April 21, 2018 at 1:07 am
I was on Council from1986 to 1991, off for 3 years due to heart surgery, and again 1995 to 1997.
April 21, 2018 at 10:48 am
Ok Cliff. I don’t mean to give you a hard time or something. I’m just resisting what looks like a bit of a knee jerk reaction. That’s why I’m pressing you on your position that the mayor’s compensation is “extremely excessive.” I think positions like that should have some basis in facts, yes?
What facts do we have?
You say that in 1986 when you were on council, the mayor’s compensation was $8000.
I’m going to deduce that you gave at least tacit approval to that rate of compensation back in 1986.
The other fact we have is that today in 2018, the mayor’s compensation is (basically) $37000.
We have some working assumptions to go along with those facts. One is that a full time job today is typically 40 hours a week, which works out to 2000 hours a year.
The mayor’s position is supposed to be part time. “Part time” as a category does not have an official, standardised definition, so I’m going with the working assumption that it is half the working hours of a full time job. In other words, 1000 hours a year.
I wouldn’t mind hearing Jo’s opinion on whether 1000 hours a year is a fair working number for the mayor’s job.
My position has been that the mayor’s compensation should be roughly equivalent to a fair hourly rate multiplied by the number of hours he works. I guessed that a fair hourly rate would be around $50, and so I proposed that a yearly compensation of around $50k would be fair. That would mean that, rather than being “extremely excessive”, the mayors compensation is not excessive at all, and in fact is well below what it should be. In other words, we’re currently under-paying, and if it is true that you get what you pay for…
But back to your position. Let’s start with the premise that $8000 was a fair level of compensation back in 1986.
The first thing I want to know is how much money was that back in 1986? One benchmark could be a comparison to minimum wage. I just googled it, and in 1986 the ontario minimum wage was $4.25. I remember making that, in fact, at my first job cleaning a green house. A part time job of 1000 hours making minimum wage in 1986 would therefore net you a total compensation of $4250. That’s just slightly more than half of what the mayor’s compensation was in 1986. Put another way, back in 1986 when you were on council, you were happy to pay the mayor almost twice what a minimum wage job would pay.
And that makes sense to me too: after all, I’m sure we can agree that Mayor is not a minimum wage job!
Now, let’s go back to our handy bank of canada inflaction calculator and see how that compares with today.
$8000 in 1986 dollars is equivalent to, after inflation, just over $16000 in 2018 dollars.
In other words, if we were compensating the mayor today at the same level as he was compensated in 1986, we would have to pay him $16000.
Now, instead we pay him $37000, which is well more than twice that. So in one sense you could say that we have more than doubled the mayors compensation since 1986.
But have we really? There’s another way we could look at this. Let’s go back to the minimum wage benchmark.
Ontario minimum wage today is, iirc, $15 and hour. So the if we take that minimum wage worker from 1986 – that worker who, back in 1986 worked 1000 hours a year at $4.25 an hour and netted a total yearly compensation of $4250 – if we took that guy and put him in the same job today making minimum wage in 2018, he would get a total yearly compensation of $15000.
That’s only a thousand bucks less than the $16k the mayor would be making today if we had continued at 1986 compensation levels. In other words, had we continued with 1986 compensation levels, the mayors job today would almost be a minimum wage job.
Don’t you think that would be a problem? Do you really think the mayor should be paid only slightly more than minimum wage? Back in 1986 he was paid twice what minimum wage was. Shouldn’t he atleast get that much today?
Incidentally, to keep the same ratio to minimum wage that we had in 1986, we’d have to pay the mayor today a minimum of $30,000 – twice what minimum wage would pay.
From that perspective, the $37k he’s getting now might be described as “excessive”, in the sense that it is $7k over that $30k minimum. I’m not sure $7000 (which, incidentally, would have only been about $3400 in 1986 dollars…) is really all that much. I might call that a “little excessive” but certainly not “extremely excessive.”
And that’s all assuming that the mayors compensation rate should only be twice the minimum wage (as it was in 1986). In my opinion, a fair wage for the mayor would be a lot more above minimum wage than that.
Bottom line, Cliff, when we look a little deeper into these numbers and see how they compare to what was done historically, I don’t think it’s nearly as controversial as your reply implied.
April 20, 2018 at 4:39 pm
I think the real question is why Saulnier’s expenses are so much higher than anyone else’s? Jo, do you know what the deal is with that?
April 20, 2018 at 8:00 pm
Councillor Saulnier has been leading the economic development activities, presumably meeting with and hosting prospective businesses. This may explain the higher expenses. Or not. The differences in expenses don’t even amount to a rounding error on the total Town of Parry Sound budget.